The Search for Meaning

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PARABOLA The Search for Meaning

The Search for Meaning VOLUME 42 NUMBER 1 SPRING 2017

8 To Take Life as Work Maurice Nicoll Change the meaning of your life ® 10 The Way of the Heart Cynthia Bourgeault There is a path beyond the mind 22 In the Midst of Winter, an Invincible Summer Tracy Cochran Seeing the light when it is darkest 30 How to Reach Where You Already Are Alan Watts New writing from the popular spiritual pioneer ® 38 The Urge to Create Carol Berry How a washed-up pastor became Vincent van Gogh 42 The Dao of Meaning Dian Duchin Reed How to live rightly and well 48 The Turn of the Dial Susan Ishmael Handling serpents, ﬁnding the Lord 56 The Truth of Impermanence Samuel Bercholz What happened after the author went to Hell ® 60 Viktor Frankl and the Search for Meaning Fran Grace A conversation with Frankl’s grandson and a Frankl family champion Photo by Dino Reichmuth. Augstmatthorn, Oberried am Brienzersee, Switzerland

® 66 Laurie Richard Whittaker Meet a man impossible to classify 74 The Dawn’s Heart Star and the Speed of Light Neil Rusch In the African desert, an Aboriginal revelation 82 Life Review and the Search for Meaning Henry Fersko-Weiss Finding meaning at the end of life 90 Impartial Kindness Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch With G.I. Gurdjieff in postwar Paris 94 Towards a Christian Tantra James Hughes Reho In a Turkish cave, a way to God 102 The I Ching and Synchronicity Annette Lowe A Jungian exploration of chance and mystery 112 You Will Find It Waiting for You Oscar Wilde After a fall from the heights, a letter from the depths

BOOK REVIEWS 114 In the Beginning Was Love: Contemplative Words of Robert Lax Robert Lax. S.T. Georgiou, editor / reviewed by Richard Whittaker

® 128 ENDPOINT EDITOR & PUBLISHER Jeff Zaleski WHAT IS A PARABOLA? EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Tracy Cochran A parabola is one of the most elegant forms in nature. It is the arc of a thrown MANAGING EDITOR Alexandra Ashmore ball and the curve of a cast ﬁshing line and EDITOR-AT-LARGE Lillian Firestone the arch of a suspension bridge. A parabola is also the arc of a spiritual WEST COAST EDITOR Richard Whittaker quest—seekers leave the known for the INDIA EDITOR Siddarth Sthalekar unknown, coming home again trans- formed by a new understanding. STORY EDITOR Betsy Cornwell Parabolas have an unusual and crucial ONLINE EDITOR Luke Storms property: as in a parabola-shaped satellite SENIOR EDITORS Christopher Bamford, Dale dish, all the beams of energy that strike a Fuller, Lee van Laer, Christian Wertenbaker parabola’s face converge at a single point. This point is called the focus. Each issue CONSULTING EDITORS David Appelbaum, Joseph of PARABOLA has its own focus: one of Bruchac, Patty de Llosa, Donna Drybread, Brian English, Miriam Faugno, Gray Henry, the timeless themes or questions of Trebbe Johnson, Winifred Lambrecht, human existence. Margo McLoughlin, Elizabeth Napp, Jacob Needleman, James Opie, David Rothenberg, Martin Rowe, Laura Simms, Richard Smoley, Phyllis Tickle, David Ulrich PARABOLA is published by The Society for the ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Connie Van Brocklin Study of Myth and Tradition. The Board of WEB CONSULTANT David Wolk Directors of the Society is as follows: ADVERTISING Goodfellow Publishers’ Stephen Schiff, President Representatives (510-548-1680); Rev. James Parks Morton [email protected] Roger Lipsey Kenneth Krushel

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6 | PARABOLA FOCUS | From the Editor

ETWEEN STIMULUS AND RESPONSE THERE IS A SPACE,” “ wrote psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl in his Bunforgettable memoir of his life in a Nazi death camp, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” In this Spring 2017 issue of Parabola, Frankl’s grandson Alexander Vesely explains how the Holocaust survivor found meaning in acts of generosity, describing how Frankl once bought a radio for a stranger because he heard the man say he couldn’t afford to buy one, telling young Vesely: “Do I need the extra ﬁfty bucks or would it be more meaningful if this man had those ﬁfty bucks?” In myriad ways, we explore how loss—through death or theft or failure or the poverty that can come with being a dedicated artist or spiritual seeker—can open us to the richness of meaning. As Carl Jung discovered in his exploration of the I Ching, detailed here in a essay by analyst Annette Lowe, meaning is opening to relationships beyond causality, to truths that call us from unknown depths. The great paradox known by ancient and Aboriginal peoples invoked in this issue is that this sense of existing in the vast space of the cosmos can be known in the depths of the human heart. “Put the mind in the heart,” writes Cynthia Bourgeault here, drawing from the PHILOKALIA, a revered spiritual collection from the Christian East. The ancient ones of the East and the West knew, as the Aboriginal ones still know, that the heart is an organ of subtle perception, intuition, and feeling.

ew knew the oneness of the heart as well as long-time Parabola contributor Huston Smith, who died as this issue Fwas created. “Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence,” wrote Huston. We at Parabola mourn his passing. May this issue help release you from the ordinary workings of stimulus and response, making space for meaning.

—Tracy Cochran

SPRING 2017 | 7 If a man begins to take life as work, then his whole relationship to existence begins to change, because the meaning of life changes for him. He sees life in another light, not as an end but as a means, and this enables him….to take what happens in life so that he learns from life and all that happens in life and in this way life becomes his teacher.

—Maurice Nicoll1

8 | PARABOLA

SPRING 2017 | 9 (,*, +- (00+-)#,)0./+/+

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The Way of the Heart

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UT THE MIND IN THE HEART.... Put the mind in the heart.... Stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart.” From page after page in Pthe PHILOKALIA, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. Whatever that exalted level of spiritual attainment is conceived to be—whether you call it “salvation,” “enlightenment,” “contemplation,” or “divine union”—this is the inner configuration in which it is found. This and no other. It leaves one wondering what these old spiritual masters actually knew and—if it’s even remotely as precise and anatomically grounded as it sounds—why this knowledge has not factored more prominently in contemporary typologies of consciousness. Part of the problem as this ancient teaching falls on contemporary ears is that we will inevitably be hearing it through a modern filter that does not serve it well. In our own times the word “heart” has come to be associated primarily with the emotions (as opposed to the mental operations of the mind), and so the instruction will be inevitably heard as “get out of your mind and into your emotions”—which is, alas, pretty close to 180 degrees from what the instruction is actually saying.

SPRING 2017 | 11 This capacity to see from within is explicitly linked to the heart, and speciﬁcally to a “heart of ﬂesh.”

Yes, it is certainly true that the there: a world where meaning, insight, heart’s native language is affectivity— and clarity come together in a whole perception through deep feelingness. different way. Saint Paul talked about But it may come as a shock to this other kind of perceptivity with the contemporary seekers to learn that term “faith” (“Faith is the substance of the things we nowadays identify with things hoped for, the evidence of things the feeling life—passion, drama, not seen”), but the word “faith” is itself intensity, compelling emotion—are often misunderstood by the linear mind. qualities that in the ancient What it really designates is not a leaping anatomical treatises were associated into the dark (as so often misconstrued) not with the heart but with the liver! but a subtle seeing in the dark, a kind of They are signs of agitation and spiritual night vision that allows one to turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather see with inner certainty that the elusive than authentic feelingness. In fact, golden thread glimpsed from within they are traditionally seen as the actually does lead somewhere. roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and erhaps the most comprehensive distort its true nature. definition of this wider spiritual And so before we can even begin to Pperceptivity is from Kabir unlock the wisdom of these ancient Helminski, a modern Sufi master. I texts, we need to gently set aside our realize that I quote it in nearly every contemporary fascination with book I have written, but I do so emotivity as the royal road to spiritual because it is so fundamental to the authenticity and return to the classic wisdom tradition that I have come to understanding from which these know as the authentic heart of teachings emerge, which features the Christianity. Here it is yet again: heart in a far more spacious and We have subtle subconscious faculties luminous role. we are not using. Beyond the limited According to the great wisdom analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, that includes psychic and extrasensory Islamic), the heart is ﬁrst and foremost abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of an organ of spiritual perception. Its unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative primary function is to look beyond the faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these obvious, the boundaried surface of faculties are many, we give them a things, and see into a deeper reality, single name with some justification for emerging from some unknown they are working best when they are in profundity, which plays lightly upon the concert. They comprise a mind, surface of this life without being caught moreover, in spontaneous connection

12 | PARABOLA to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call “heart.”1

“The heart,” Helminski continues, is the antenna that receives the emanations of subtler levels of existence. The human heart has its proper field of function beyond the limits of the superficial, reactive ego-self. Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.2

Now it may concern some of you that you’re hearing Islamic teaching here, (/0 &+."-*.,)0,0&(-!!-#'0(/-+* not Christian. And it may well be true 0*(+//0..)/0!/''/) /+' 0-%-!. that this understanding of the heart as -+%0,&+*//)*(0"/)*&+ “spiritualized mind”— “the organ heart as an organ of spiritual perception, prepared by God for contemplation”3— and he had his own highly specific has been brought to its subtlest and method for catalyzing this quantum leap most comprehensive articulation in the in human consciousness. I have written great Islamic Sufi masters. As early as the extensively about this in my book THE tenth century, Al-Hakîm al Tirmidhî’s WISDOM JESUS, in which I lay out the masterful TREATISE ON THE HEART laid the principles of his kenotic (“letting go”) foundations for an elaborate Sufi spirituality as a pathway of conscious understanding of the heart as a tripartite transformation leading to nondual physical, emotional, and spiritual organ.4 awakening. You will see there how this On this foundation would gradually rise goal formed the core of his teaching, an expansive repertory of spiritual hidden in plain sight for twenty practices supporting this increasingly centuries now. I will be drawing on this “sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, material from time to time as it becomes and refined” heart attunement. pertinent to our present exploration. But it’s right there in Christianity as For now, the essential point is simply to well. Aside from the incomparable realize that the teaching on the heart is Orthodox teachings on Prayer of the not intrinsically an “Islamic” revelation, Heart collected in the PHILOKALIA, it’s any more than it is a “Christian” one. If completely scriptural. Simply open your anything, its headwaters lie in that great Bible to the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:8) evolutionary incubator of Judaism, in and read the words straight from Jesus which more and more in those final himself: “Blessed are the pure in heart, centuries before the Common Era, the for they shall see God.” great Israelite prophets begin to sense a We will return to what “pure in new evolutionary star rising on the heart” means in due course. But clearly horizon of consciousness. Yahweh is Jesus had a foundational grasp on the about to do something new, about to up

SPRING 2017 | 13 ,'-."$0&) (,%$0&'*+.- the ante in the continuing journey of observe my ordinances. Then you shall mutual self-disclosure that has formed live in the land I gave to your ancestors, the basis of the covenant with Israel. and you shall be my people and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:24–28) The prophet Ezekiel gets it the most directly, as the following words of A new interiority is dawning on the revelation tumble from his mouth, horizon, a new capacity to read the directly from the heart of God: pattern from within: to live the I will take you from the nations and covenant without a need for external gather you from all the countries, and forms and regulations, simply by living bring you into your own land. I will it from an inner integrity. And for the sprinkle clean water upon you, and you first time in Western history, this shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, capacity to see from within is explicitly and from all your idols I will cleanse you. linked to the heart, and specifically to A new heart I will give you, and a new a “heart of flesh.” spirit I will put within you; and I will Without any attempt to end-run the remove from your body the heart of massive theological and historical stone and give you a heart of ﬂesh. I will put my spirit within you and make you parameters that have grown up around follow my statutes and be careful to this issue, my bare-bones take on Jesus

14 | PARABOLA The heart takes on the subtle individual colors of a person without losing its essential universality.

is that he comes as the “master the chest, close to the heart and in the cardiologist,” the next in the great heart. When the divine warmth comes, 5 succession of Hebrew prophets, to do all this will be clear. that “heart surgery” first announced by The following instruction is even Ezekiel. And his powerfully original (at more specific: least in terms of anything heretofore When we read in the writings of the seen in the Semitic lands) method of Fathers about the place of the heart awakening heart perceptivity—through which the mind finds by way of prayer, we a radical nonclinging or “letting go”— must understand by this the spiritual will in fact reveal itself as the tie rod faculty that exists in the heart. Placed by connecting everything I am talking the creator in the upper part of the heart, about in this book. this spiritual faculty distinguishes the human heart from the heart of animals.... The intellectual faculty in man’s soul, DO I REALLY MEAN though spiritual, dwells in the brain, that THE PHYSICAL HEART? is to say in the head: in the same way, the spiritual faculty which we term the spirit of man, though spiritual, dwells in the ot to be naive here, but yes. upper part of the heart, close to the left We are indeed talking about nipple of the chest and a little above it.6 Nthe physical heart, at least insofar as it furnishes our bodily anchor While the sheer physicality of this for all those wondrous voyages into far- may make some readers squirm, the flung spiritual realms. contemporary phenomenologist Robert Again, the Eastern Orthodox Sardello is another strong advocate for a tradition is not in the least equivocal full inclusion of the physical heart in any on this point. Lest there be any serious consideration of the spirituality tendency to hear the word as merely of the heart. When he speaks of the symbolic of some “innermost essence” heart, as he makes clear in his of a person, the texts direct us remarkable book SILENCE: THE MYSTERY OF immediately to the chest, where the WHOLENESS, he is always referring to “the sign that prayer is progressing will be a physical organ of the heart,” which palpable physical warmth: merits this special consideration precisely To stand guard over the heart, to stand because “it functions simultaneously as a 7 with the mind in the heart, to descend physical, psychic, and spiritual organ.” from the head to the heart—all these It is this seamlessly tripartite nature of are one and the same thing. The core the heart’s field of activity that bestows of the work lies in concentrating the its unusual transformative powers. While attention and the standing before the there are many spiritual traditions that invisible Lord, not in the head but in focus on “the heart as the instrument

SPRING 2017 | 15 through which religious practices take place,” Sardello feels that “these traditions do not focus on the inherent activity of the heart, which is already an act of a spiritual nature.”8 To demonstrate what this “inherently spiritual nature” of the heart might feel like, Sardello leads his readers on a profound voyage of discovery into the inner chambers of their own heart. Wielding those two classic tools of inner work, attention and sensation, he teaches us how to access the heart through concentrated sensation (rather than visualization or emotion) and there discover its inherent vibrational signature as “pure intimacy...intimacy without something or someone attached to that intimacy.”9 I have to say I followed that exercise several times and was astonished by the results. I had experienced something of that “pure intimacy” before, as that sort of golden tenderness that sometimes surrounds a period of Centering Prayer. But never had I experienced it with such useful books for the spiritually force or clarity, as a distinct inner adventurous nonspecialist: THE BIOLOGY OF bandwidth resonating in perfect TRANSCENDENCE by Joseph Chilton Pearce11 synchrony with (in Kabir Helminski’s and THE SECRET TEACHING OF PLANTS by words) “its cosmic milieu, the infinity of Stephen Harrod Buhner.12 Marshaling love.” No wonder the embodied aspect considerable scientific data in a format of heart spirituality is so important! For easily accessible to a lay reader, each of it is only through sensation—that is, these books demonstrates how “attention concentrated in the heart”— contemporary science has taken us far that this experience of utter fullness and beyond the notion of the heart as a belonging becomes accessible.10 mechanical pump to revision it as “an Sardello is not the only voice in the electromagnetic generator,”13 working field. There is now a substantial and simultaneously across a range of growing body of “bridge literature” vibrational frequencies to perform its linking classic spiritual teachings on the various tasks of internal and external heart with emerging discoveries in the self-regulation and information field of neurobiology. I have already exchange. (An “organ of spiritual mentioned the pioneering work of the perception,” after all, can be understood HeartMath Institute, but I want to call in this context as simply an attention to two other fascinating and electromagnetic generator picking up

16 | PARABOLA (/0/. (.) 0,0*(/0/-+*0+,!0*(/0,,0,0*(/0/-#0,0). 0" 00 0+.*.'(0&'/&! information at far subtler vibrational comprehensible and brings additional bandwidths.) Both books call confirmation that “putting the mind in attention, as does the HeartMath the heart” is not merely a quaint Institute, to the intricate feedback spiritual metaphor but contains precise loops between heart and brain—almost and essential information on the as if the human being were expressly physiological undergirding of wired to facilitate this exchange, which conscious transformation. Pearce sees as fundamentally between the universal (carried in the heart) and WHAT GETS IN THE WAY? the particular (carried in the brain). As he expresses it, “The heart takes on the subtle individual colors of a person ccording to Western without losing its essential universality. understanding, the heart does It seems to mediate between our A not need to be “grown” or individual self and a universal process “evolved.” Every heart is already a while being representative of that perfect holograph of the divine heart, universal process.”14 While such bold carrying within itself full access to the statements may make hard-core information of the whole. But it does scientists writhe, from the spiritual side need to be puriﬁed, as Jesus himself of the bridge it is easily observed. In its spiritual capacity, the

SPRING 2017 | 17 Today, the notion of “passionlessness” equates to “emotionally brain dead.” If you take away passion, what is left?

heart is fundamentally a homing beacon, eagerly sought after in the ancient allowing us to stay aligned with those teachings of the desert fathers and “emanations from more subtle levels of mothers) equates to “emotionally brain existence” Helminski refers to, and dead.” If you take away passion, what is hence to follow the authentic path of left? our own unfolding. But when the So once again we have to begin with signals get jammed by the interference some decoding. of lower-level noise, then it is no longer If you consult any English dictionary, able to do its beaconing work. you will discover that the word Unanimously, the Christian wisdom “passion” comes from the Latin verb tradition proclaims that the source of patior, which means “to suffer” (passio is this lower-level noise is “the passions.” the first-person singular). But this still As the PHILOKALIA repeatedly emphasizes, doesn’t get us all the way, because the the problem with the passions is that literal, now largely archaic, meaning of they divide the heart.15 A heart that is the verb “to suffer” (to “undergo or divided, pulled this way and that by experience”) is literally to be acted upon. competing inner agendas, is like a wind- The chief operative here is the tossed sea: unable to reflect on its involuntary and mechanical aspect of the surface the clear image of the moon. transaction. And according to the Here again is a teaching that tends to traditional wisdom teachings, it is set contemporary people’s teeth on precisely that involuntary and edge. I know this from personal mechanical aspect of being “grabbed” experience, because the issue comes up that leads to suffering in the sense of at nearly every workshop I give. To our how we use the term today. Thus, in the modern Western way of hearing, ancient insights on which this spiritual “passion” is a good thing: something teaching rests, passion did not mean akin to élan vital, the source of our élan vital, energy, or aliveness. It aliveness and motivation. It is to be designated being stuck, grabbed, and encouraged, not discouraged. At a blindly reactive. recent workshop I led, a bishop This original meaning is clearly approached me with some concern and uppermost in the powerful teaching of explained that in his diocese, following the fourth-century desert father the recommendations of a church Evagrius Ponticus. Sometimes credited consultant, he had managed to boost with being the first spiritual psychologist morale and productivity by significant in the Christian West, Evagrius percentages simply by encouraging his developed a marvelously subtle teaching clergy “to follow their passions.” on the progressive nature of emotional Well-nigh universally today, the entanglement, a teaching that would notion of “passionlessness” (a quality eventually bear fruit in the fully

18 | PARABOLA -#,))-0-)#0"(.%# 0 -.)*0& &'*.)&'0(&+"($0. &/%0.#-% ,$ /#/+-%0.'*+."*$0/.", articulated doctrine of the seven deadly becomes even more involuntary and sins. His core realization was that when mechanically triggered. the first stirrings of what will eventually What breaks the syndrome? For become full-fledged passionate outbursts Evagrius, liberation lies in an appear on the screen of consciousness, increasingly developed inner capacity to they begin as “thoughts”—logismoi, in notice when a thought is beginning to take his words—streams of associative logic on emotional coloration and to nip it in following well-conditioned inner tracks. the bud before it becomes a passion by dis- At first they are merely that—“thought- identifying or disengaging from it. This loops,” mere flotsam on the endlessly is the essence of the teaching that has moving river of the mind. But at some held sway in our tradition for more than point a thought-loop will entrain with a thousand years. one’s sense of identity—an emotional Now, of course, there are various value or point of view is suddenly at ways of going about this disengaging. stake—and then one is hooked. A Contemporary psychology has added passion is born, and the emotions spew the important qualifier that disengaging forth. Thomas Keating has marvelously is not the same thing as repressing repackaged this ancient teaching in his (which is simply sweeping the issue diagram of the life cycle of an emotion,16 under the psychological rug) and has a core part of his Centering Prayer developed important methodologies for teaching. This diagram makes clear that allowing people to become consciously once the emotion is engaged, once that present to and “own” the stew sense of “I” locks in, what follows is a fermenting within them. But it must full-scale emotional uproar—which also be stated that “owning” does not then, as Father Keating points out, automatically entail either “acting out” simply drives the syndrome deeper and or verbally “expressing” that emotional deeper into the unconscious, where it uproar. Rather, the genius of the earlier tradition has been to insist that if one

SPRING 2017 | 19 can merely back the identification out— that sense of “me,” stuck to a fixed frame of reference or value—then the energy being co-opted and squandered in useless emotional turmoil can be recaptured at a higher level to strengthen the intensity and clarity of heart perceptivity. Rather than fueling the “reactive ego-self,” the energy can be “rejoined to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.” And that, essentially, constitutes the goal of purification—at least as it has been understood in service of conscious transformation.

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ere again, we have an Happiness is tinged with sadness, grief important clarification touches at its bottomless depths the Hcontributed by Robert mysterious upwelling of comfort, Sardello. Echoing the classic loneliness is suffused with intimacy, and understanding of the Christian Inner the deep ache of yearning for the absent tradition (I first encountered this beloved becomes the paradoxical teaching in the Gurdjieff Work), sacrament of presence. “For beauty is Sardello points out that most of us use only the beginning of a terror we can the terms “feeling” and “emotion” just scarcely bear,” observes Rilke, “and interchangeably, as if they are synonyms. the reason we adore it so is that it They are not. Emotion is technically serenely disdains to destroy us.”18 “stuck” feeling, feeling bound to a fixed Such is the sensation of the heart point of view or fixed reference point. beginning to swim in those deeper “We are not free in our emotional life,” waters, awakening to its birthright as an he points out, since emotion always organ of spiritual perception. And it “occurs quite automatically as a reaction would stand to reason, of course, that to something that happens to us.”17 It the experience is feeling-ful because that would correspond to what Helminski is the heart’s modus operandi; it gains calls “the heart in service to the reactive information by entering the inside of ego-self.” things and coming into resonance with Beyond this limited sphere opens up them. But this is feeling of an entirely a vast reservoir of feelingness. Here the different order, no longer affixed to a currents run hard and strong, always personal self-center, but flowing in tinged with a kind of multivalence in holographic union with that which can which the hard-and-fast boundaries always and only flow, the great distinguishing one emotion from dynamism of love. “Feeling as a form of another begin to blend together. knowing”19 becomes the pathway of this

20 | PARABOLA As one is able to release the heart from its enslavement to the passions, this other heart emerges: of luminous sight and compassionate action. other mode of perceptivity, more Challenge of Islam,” in Rob Barker and Gray Henry, eds., MERTON AND SUFISM: THE UNTOLD STORY intense, but strangely familiar and (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1999), 65. effortless. 4 For extensive bibliographical information on this work, see “A Treatise on the Heart,” trans. The great wager around which the Nicholas Heer, (ibid., 79–88). Western Inner tradition has encamped is 5 E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer, eds., THE ART OF PRAYER: AN ORTHODOX ANTHOLOGY (London: Faber that as one is able to release the heart and Faber, 1966), 194. from its enslavement to the passions, 6 Ibid., 190. this other heart emerges: this “organ of 7 Robert Sardello, SILENCE: THE MYSTERY OF WHOLENESS (Benson, NC: Goldenstone Press, 2006), 82. contemplation,” of luminous sight and 8 Ibid. compassionate action. For what one 9 Ibid., 86. “sees” and entrains with is none other 10 No wonder the embodied aspect of heart spirituality is so important! For if Sardello is right here than this higher order of divine (and my own work confirms that he is), then the coherence and compassion, which can stunning conclusion is that there is no lack. That primordial hunger for intimacy and belonging we be verified as objectively real, but so frantically project onto others in our attempt to becomes accessible only when the heart find fulfillment is fulfilled already, there in the “infinity of love” already residing holographically is able to rise to this highest level and in our own hearts, once we have truly learned to assume its cosmically appointed attune to its frequency and trust that with which it reverberates. In this sense, our physical heart is the function. Then grace upon grace flows quintessential “treasure buried in the field.” through this vibrating reed and on out 11 Joseph Chilton Pearce, THE BIOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE:A BLUEPRINT OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT into a transfigured world: transfigured (Rochester, VT: Park Street Place, 2002). by the very grace of being bathed in this 12 Stephen Harrod Buhner, THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF undivided light. PLANTS: THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE HEART IN THE DIRECT PERCEPTION OF NATURE (Rochester, VT: Bear and “Blessed are the pure in heart, for Company, 2004). they shall see God.” In this one 13 Ibid., 71. 14 sentence, the whole of the teaching is Pearce, 64–65. 15 For a particularly clear and forceful discussion of conveyed. What remains is for us to this point, see E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. come to a greater understanding of Palmer, trans., UNSEEN WARFARE, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (Crestwood, how this purification is actually NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1987), 241–44. accomplished: a critical issue on which 16 Reproduced in Cynthia Bourgeault, CENTERING PRAYER AND INNER AWAKENING (Cambridge, MA: Christian tradition is by no means Cowley Publications, 2004), 136. unanimous. This will be the subject of 17 Sardello, 72. 18 our next chapter. Rainer Maria Rilke, DUINO ELEGIES, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1939), 21. 1 Kabir Helminski, LIVING PRESENCE: A SUFI GUIDE TO 19 Sardello, 72. MINDFULNESS AND THE ESSENTIAL SELF (New York: Tarcher/Perigree Books, 1992), 157. 2 Ibid., 158. From THE HEART OF CENTERING PRAYER by Cynthia 3 Bourgeault © 2016. Reprinted in arrangement Sidney H. Griffith, “Merton, Massignon, and the with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

SPRING 2017 | 21

22 | PARABOLA cáåÇáåÖ=íÜÉ=äáÖÜí=áå=íÜÉ=Ç~êâÉëí=çÑ=íáãÉë

In the Midst of Winter, an Invincible Summer qê~Åó=`çÅÜê~å

Y DAUGHTER ALEX ONCE PUT HER BIKE out on our Brooklyn street for any stranger to take. M She made a sign saying “Free bike! Please enjoy!” in purple crayon, adding a bold smiley face. I helped her carry the bike down the steep steps of our brownstone and place it under the streetlight, the sign taped to the seat. Lying in bed that night, her face shone with happy anticipation. Things appeared and disappeared on the street all the time, but it was different being part of it. In a way, this was what I wanted her to understand: meaning is an action; we make meaning through our actions. You exist in a web of life: this was the message. You are part of nature and part of the human community. And when you give, you receive something. A good friend of mine once told me that her father took her and the other kids in the family to Coney Island to look at the rides through a fence. To an adult, observing other people riding the Cyclone or the Wonder Wheel may have seemed a clever money-saving move, almost as good as the real thing, even preferable: people don’t die watching roller coasters. To the children, of course, it wasn’t even close.

SPRING 2017 | 23 my Some truths must be lived. I knew own doubts and major flaws, I seemed this, even though I spent a lot of time to have pulled off something amazing. reading and thinking about life. The “Now, when do I get something aspiration, beyond recycling a little back?” she asked, her big eyes without purple bike with training wheels that guile. I had no answer. It was as if a was outgrown, was to kindle something curtain was drawn back, revealing a in Alex: an interest in the great exchange blank wall. Alex was asking profound that is always happening in life, a sense questions, and I shared them: is the of being part of it. I could barely find universe benevolent? How can we words for it, and I was far from being a begin to understand our relationship role model of engagement. I was an to this life? over-thinker, an observer. The hope was “Be patient with all that is unsolved that if all the elements came together, in your heart,” writes Rilke. “And try to the action in the street, the larger idea, love the questions themselves. Do not there might be fire. seek the answers, which cannot be given The next morning Alex clambered to you because you would not be able to down the steps from her loft bed and live them. And the point is to live flung open the drapes of the big everything. Live the questions.” windows in the living room. She whirled The thinking mind hates this kind of around, her face as radiant as if it was suggestion. It wants to know. It wants Christmas morning. The bike was gone! to lift itself up above our flowing, We marveled together, although we changing, moment-by-moment were marveling at different things. I was experience, the world of the body and marveling at having given birth to a its perceptions and feelings. It wants us child who seemed to take joy in giving to be someone, and it wants life to be without knowing who might benefit, predictable and within our control. But who seemed to delight in being part of our Brooklyn neighborhood gentrified, the dance of life. Incredibly, in spite of and our brownstone sold to a Wall

24 | PARABOLA Some truths can only be experienced: the ground giving way beneath our feet is one.

Street investor and his young wife, who superficial efforts, by quick stabs. What brought an architect into our apartment drove me to keep trying to teach what I to discuss massive renovations as I sat at didn’t understand? I wanted Alex to feel my desk, trying to work. welcome on the earth. I wanted to teach her to be strong and have hope, but it e moved to northern seemed we were all being swept along Westchester. Alexandra passively by time and circumstance. Wgrieved for the life and “Hope is not a form of guarantee,” diversity of Brooklyn, withdrawing writes the critic John Berger. “It’s a into the world of HARRY POTTER and THE form of energy, and very frequently that LORD OF THE RINGS, spending hours energy is strongest in circumstances that online with friends who shared her are very dark.” interests. I made a stab at gardening, Within the year, a super storm hoping to soothe and ground us in flooded the downstairs and washed the our new life, to bring a happy little kid garden beds away. I ran around the back to me by bringing her in touch house in the middle of the night, on my with the earth. way to the basement to save boxes of Stab is the correct word for the pictures and diplomas and other items. effort I made, brief and blunt. Only if a The seemingly solid ground turned to person were blind and drunk and liquid mud. Some truths can only be working without tools could they get experienced: the ground giving way muddier than I even when I was just beneath our feet is one. transplanting a few flowers. Reluctantly, Alex joined me a few times, wandering ife is always in movement and outside wearing rubber boots and always uncertain. Yet deeper pajama bottoms, trailing a trowel as if Ltruths are revealed when we need she were joining a chain gang. them; doors open from the inside. I Alex complained that everything learned this one December, in the about the digging and the planting international arrival terminal of JFK went slowly. I told her that the work airport in New York. It had been a long and the pace were the same for our and difficult trip, and I pictured earliest ancestors, but I knew this snuggling safely into the car and soon couldn’t be true. They would have my own warm bed, a returning warrior, starved if they had farmed this way. battered but enriched by my Alex said she didn’t like pretending we experiences. I reached my hand into the were “back in ancestral times.” I didn’t bag and that bubble burst. Somewhere blame her. We were not our ancestors between the baggage claim and the car, and we couldn’t know what they knew. my wallet had disappeared. There are truths that cannot be I took everything out of my bag and known by outside observation, by examined the interior, and then I did it

SPRING 2017 | 25 again, unwilling to accept the gaping been better than just losing all that absence of something that felt so money to dark unseen forces, essential to my sense of security. I cycled wouldn’t it? I was in no state to through the expected reactions: panic remember the night I had urged Alex and disbelief, the desperate hope that to give her little purple bike to the some honest citizen had turned the universe, but the contrast was crazy. wallet in, then rage and self-blame about How could I trust in the goodness little things, that psychic cutting of life? technique we use to ward off the greater In spite of all of our care and pain of feeling vulnerable. I picked on precaution, life is unpredictable and little details. Why did I stand in such a subject to change. Our sense of crowded place to retrieve my suitcase? security and control is mostly an Why didn’t I wait? illusion. No matter how hard we try Home from the airport, after a to be safe and achieve and become flurry of phone calls, I lay in bed in someone in this world, life is the dark, wrestling with the dark uncertainty, and we are wavering angel of the deeper why. Why was I so creatures. There will be unexpected careless? A chorus of witch-like voices changes at the last moment. There will chimed in: you’ve always been this way. be loss. I felt like a blind and wounded giant “Security is mostly a superstition,” lurching around breaking things writes Helen Keller. “It does not exist inside. Why hadn’t I gone ahead and in nature nor do the children of men bought that ridiculously expensive as a whole experience it. Avoiding sweater or that expensive scotch or danger is no safer in the long run than that age-reversing face cream I saw in outright exposure. Life is either a the duty-free shop? It would have daring adventure, or nothing.”

26 | PARABOLA I lost the wallet during the darkest illuminating a carving of a triple spiral time of year in the Northern on the front wall. Hemisphere, days before the Winter I have often imagined how it must Solstice, the day when the North Pole is have been to gather in that chamber five tilted farthest from the sun. Our ancient thousand years ago, how dark it must ancestors noted that darkest day, have been before dawn in a world lit watching the stars and noticing the only by fire. Why did these ancient shortening days, patiently abiding until ancestors undertake such a vast and one day, they noticed a shift: the darkest exacting project? Some researchers day was followed by a little more light. speculate that they were ritually In Newgrange, in the east of Ireland, capturing the sun on the shortest day, as there is a mysterious Neolithic if they were children capable of little monument, a huge circular mound with more than magical thinking. But the a passageway and interior chambers. engineering and astronomy required to Tests reveal that it was built in 3200 build Newgrange refutes this. It is a B.C.E., which makes it older than the monument to attention and faith. pyramids in Giza and older than Lying in bed the night of the wallet, Stonehenge. No one can say exactly finally exhausted from all my thinking, I what it is for, a tomb, a place of rituals. thought about this extraordinary feat. It But here is where it gets extraordinary: seemed amazing to me that these it was built so that the light of the rising ancient people could stay open and sun on the Winter Solstice, on observing that way in all weather, going December 21, floods the chamber. Just on being with life without rushing to as the sun rises, sunlight pours through conclusion. Left to its own devices, the an opening above the main entrance, ordinary thinking mind tends towards shining along the passage and pessimism. The light will never return, it

SPRING 2017 | 27 We make ourselves available to life, opening our hearts...knowing we will blunder and get it wrong but sometimes right.

tells us; it is always darkest before it is how things change. When we aren’t pitch black: that kind of grim prediction. wishing for something to be over, or A shift occurs when the thinking when we aren’t freezing around an idea mind emerges from its self-enclosed about what it is we are seeing, we see isolation and re-enters the world and hear more. We notice that nature through the perceptions and feelings of has cycles, that each day is not the same the body. Most of the time we modern length and quality, and that darkness people treat the body as if it is little passes. more than a mute animal that carries us We don’t have the same close around. We dress it and feed it and connection to nature that our ancient sometimes buy expensive moisturizer for ancestors had but we have the same the poor thing but mostly it disappoints bodies and hearts and minds, the same us, even as it tries to serve us as loyally capacity for attention with faith. The as a good dog. Buddha described the experience of The trip that landed me in JFK had enlightenment in many different ways, been a visit to my now grown daughter including being forgiven our debts and Alex, educated, married, and living in experiencing the breaking of a fever. A England. How do these changes Zen master once explained that happen? Often during the trip, I looked enlightenment happens in small at my jet-lagged face in the mirror, moments, many times. These moments bewildered by what I saw: who was this tend to come when we stop fighting older-looking woman with the vaguely reality, when we relax and open. This worried look in her eyes? Most of us state of opening is also called feel we are not enough somehow, not liberation, and it often comes in the quick enough or somehow substantial midst of what we think of as failure and enough. Life sweeps us along, and it crushing disappointment. often seems there is no solid ground. We each find the deeper truths in our time and own way. We find them as n Buddhism, a definition of faith is we learn to observe from the inside. In the ability to keep our hearts open England, my daughter and her husband Iin the darkness of the unknown. drove me to visit the sets of the Harry The root of the word patience is a Latin Potter films. It was a pilgrimage to a verb for “suffer,” which in the ancient modern Newgrange, a monument to sense meant to hold, not to grasp but the work that showed young Alex the to bear, to tolerate without pushing magical potential of life, the way the away. Being patient doesn’t mean being light gets in no matter how dark. J.K. passive. It means being attentive, Rowling, author of the HARRY POTTER willing to be available to what is series, once told a graduating class of happening, going on seeing, noticing Harvard that failure was the bedrock

28 | PARABOLA upon which she built her real life. message would be no big deal, nice Failing utterly by worldly standards words. But that night it was a candle in granted her the freedom to strip her life the darkness. The eye barely registers down to the essentials, to tell the story the light of a candle in broad daylight of a lonely boy who, unknown to but on a dark night it can be seen a long himself, was really a wizard. way, shining out as a reminder that there Lying in bed that night, I was still warmth and benevolence in the remembered that the Buddha also world, the possibility of companionship believed he was a failure. Alone on a and kindness here in the midst of it all. riverbank, split off from his yogi I felt a little blip of love and brothers, he broke his vows and took gratitude. I thanked her and another food offered by a young woman. little message flashed back. It was a Nourished by this simple act of trifling exchange, complete with kindness, he remembered a simple time emoticons, yet it felt wiser and more from childhood. He had sat alone under alive than the dire and dramatic racket a rose apple tree, watching his father and in my head. Once when she was other men from his village plow the younger, I told my daughter that it fields for spring planting. Peaceful and was more important to be kind than to happy, with no adults bothering him, he be right. Now I realized that kindness could be open and attentive to life as it is also wise. flowed around him. Lying in bed in the dark, watching “Heaven and Earth give themselves,” my iPhone light up, it dawned on me teaches the twentieth-century Japanese that the meaning of life, the real purpose Zen master Kodo Sawaki. “Air, water, of our presence here, is being attentive, plants, animals, and humans give being willing to go on seeing and themselves to each other. It is in this keeping our hearts open—not just for giving-themselves-to-each-other that we our sake but for the sake of others. We actually live.” make ourselves available to life, opening The boy Buddha also saw insect our hearts to the passing flow of it, families tossed about by the plowing and knowing we will blunder and get it felt a pang of compassion. He took this wrong but sometimes right. We do this impression of equanimity, of being open even knowing that those hearts will to the flow of life, to joy and sorrow and inevitably break because life is all that arises, under the Bodhi tree. This uncertainty and change and loss. But memory of being kind and humble and sometimes when we are open, light selfless, just a little kid sitting under a floods the darkest chamber. tree, became the bedrock of his enlightenment. “In the midst of winter, I found there At about 1 a.m. on the night I lost was, within me, an invincible summer. my wallet, the iPhone on the bedside And that makes me happy. For it says that table lit up. A band of light flashed no matter how hard the world pushes across the screen in the dark, a message against me, within me, there’s something from my daughter in England. Mom, I’m so sorry this happened to you. In the stronger, something better, pushing right light of day and in smooth times, such a back.” – Albert Camus

SPRING 2017 | 29

30 | PARABOLA How to Reach Where You Already Are

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O, HOW CAN AN INDIVIDUAL REALIZE THAT THEY ARE THE UNIVERSAL SELF? In what way can a person who is Sunder the impression that they are a separate individual enclosed in a bag of skin effectively realize that they are Brahman? This, of course, is a curious question. It proposes a journey to the place where you already are. Now, it’s true that you may not know that you are there, but you are. And if you take a journey to the place where you are, you will visit many other places than the place where you are, and perhaps when you ﬁnd through some long experience that all the places you go to are not the place you wanted to ﬁnd, it may occur to you that you were already there in the beginning. And that is the Dharma, or “method,” as I prefer to translate the word. That’s the method that all gurus and spiritual teachers fundamentally use. So, they are all tricksters.

SPRING 2017 | 31 We are afraid here and now to see the truth. And if we had the nerve—you know, real nerve—we’d see it right away.

Why use trickster as a word to method to arrive at the place where describe them? Did you know that it’s you already are. No amount of terribly difﬁcult to surprise yourself on searching will uncover the self, because purpose? Somebody else has to do it for all searching implies the absence of the you, which is why a guru or teacher is so self—the big self, the Self with a capital often necessary. And there are many S. So to seek it is to thrust it away. And kinds of gurus, but among human gurus to practice a discipline to attain it is to there are square gurus and beat gurus. postpone realization. Square gurus take you through the There’s a famous Zen story of a regular channels; beat gurus lead you in monk sitting in meditation. The by means that are very strange indeed— master comes along and asks, “What they are rascals. Also, friends can act as are you doing?” And the monk replies, gurus. And then there are gurus who “Oh, I’m meditating so I can become aren’t people, like situations or books. a Buddha.” Well, the master sits down Regardless, the guru’s job is to show the nearby, picks up a brick, and starts inquirer in some effective way that they rubbing it. And the monk asks, “What are already what they are looking for. are you doing?” The master says, “Oh, In Hindu traditions, realizing who I’m rubbing this brick to make it into you really are is called Sadhana, which a mirror.” And the monk says, “No means “discipline.” Sadhana is the way amount of rubbing a brick can turn it of life that is necessary to follow in order into a mirror.” To which the master to escape from the illusion that you are replies, “And no amount of zazen will merely a skin encapsulated ego. Sadhana turn you into a Buddha.” They don’t comprises yoga, which has the Sanskrit like this story very much in modern root yuj, which means “to join,” and it day Japan. is from this root that we have the Suppose I were to tell you that you, English words yoke, junction, and union. right now, are the great Self— the Strictly speaking, yoga means “the state Brahman. Now, you might feel of union”—the state in which the somewhat sympathetic to this idea individual self, the jivatman, ﬁnds that it intellectually, but you don’t really feel it. is ultimately atman. So a yogi is You’re looking for a way to feel it—a someone who has realized that union. practice for getting there. But you don’t But normally yoga as a word isn’t used really want to feel it; you’re frightened that way; it’s normally used to describe a of it. So you get this or that practice so practice of meditation whereby one you can put it off, so that you can feel comes into the state of union, and in that you have a long way to go, and that sense a yogi is a traveler or seeker maybe after you’ve suffered enough, who is on the way to that union. Of then you can realize you are the atman. course, strictly speaking, there is no Why put it off? Because we are brought

32 | PARABOLA up in a social scheme that tells us we very clever. They don’t go out on the have to deserve what we get, and the streets and preach and tell you that you price to pay for all good things is need to be converted— they sit down suffering. But all of that is mere under a tree and wait. And people start postponement. We are afraid here and coming around and bringing their now to see the truth. And if we had the problems and propositions to the guru, nerve—you know, real nerve—we’d see and the guru answers and challenges it right away. But that’s when we you in whatever way they think is immediately feel that we shouldn’t have appropriate to your situation. Now, if nerve like that, because it would be you’ve got a thin shell and your mask is awful. After all, we’re supposed to feel easily dispatched with, the guru uses the like a poor little me who has to work easy method. They’ll say, “Come off it, and work and suffer in order to become Shiva! Stop pretending you’re this guy something far away and great, like a here. I know who you are!” But most Buddha or Jivanmukta—someone who people won’t respond to that. Most becomes liberated. people have very thick shells, so the So you can suffer for it. There are guru has to invent ways of cracking all kinds of ways invented for you to those shells. do this. You can discipline yourself and gain control of your mind and do o understand yoga, you should all sorts of extraordinary things—like read Patañjali—the Yoga Sutras. drink water in through your rectum TThere are so many translations, and push a peanut up a mountain and I’m not sure which is the best. This with your nose. There are all sorts of sutra begins, “Now yoga is explained.” accomplishments you can engage in. That’s the first verse, and the But they have absolutely nothing to commentators say that “now” in this do with the realization of the self. context carries the meaning that you’re The realization of the self supposed to know other material fundamentally depends on coming off beforehand. Specifically, you’re it, just as when someone is putting on supposed to be a civilized human being some kind of act and we say, “Oh, before you begin yoga—you’re come off it.” And some people can supposed to have been disciplined in come off it—they laugh, because they Artha, Kama, and Dharma. You’re suddenly realize they’ve been making supposed to have engaged in politics, a fool of themselves. the arts of sensuality, and justice before So that’s the job of the trickster—the you can begin yoga. The next verse is guru, the teacher—to help you come off “Yogash chitta vritti nirodha,” which it. And to this end, the guru will come means “Yoga is the cessation of up with all sorts of exercises to get you revolutions of the mind,” and this can to come off it. And maybe after you get mean many things—stop the waves of enough discipline and frustration and the mind, attain a perfectly calm mind, suffering, you’ll finally give it all up and stop thinking entirely, or even realize that you were there from the eliminate all contents from the mind. beginning and there was nothing to How can you do that? Well, the sutra realize in the first place. See, the guru is goes on to give you particular steps:

SPRING 2017 | 33 pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, intense light. Just go in and in an in— dhyana, and samadhi. it’s a most thrilling experience. Pranayama means controlling the So you’re doing this kind of practice breath, pratyahara refers to when the guru suddenly wakes you up. preliminary concentration, dharana is And they say, “What are you looking at a more intense form of concentration, that light for?” And you stammer dhyana—the same dhyana from which something about wanting realization the word Zen comes—means because we live in a world in which we profound union between subject and identify ourselves with the ego and we object, and then there’s samadhi—the therefore get into trouble and suffer. attainment of non-dualistic And the guru asks, “Well, are you afraid consciousness. See what’s happening of that?” And you respond, “Yes.” Well, here? First, you learn to control your then the guru points out to you that all breath. And breathing is a very you’re doing is practicing yoga out of strange thing, because breathing can fear—you’re just escaping and running be viewed both as a voluntary and away. And how far do you think you can involuntary action. You can feel that get into realization through fear? So you breathe and yet you can also feel then you think, “Well, now I’ve got to that breathing breathes you. And practice yoga, but not with a fearful there are all sorts of fancy ways to motive.” And all the while, the guru is breathe in yoga which are very watching you. They’re a highly sensitive amusing to practice, because you can person, and they know exactly what get quite high on them. So this sutra you’re doing—they know exactly what sets you up with all sorts of tricks and your motive is. So they put you onto the if you are bright you may begin to kick of getting a pure motive, which realize some things at this point. means getting a very deep control of But if you are not very bright, your emotions. So you try not to have you’ll have to go on to work on impure thoughts. You try and try and concentration. You learn to maybe manage to repress as many concentrate the mind on one point. impure thoughts as possible and then Now, this can be an absolutely one day the guru asks, “Why are you fascinating undertaking. Here’s one repressing your thoughts? What’s your way to try it out: find some bright, motive here?” And then you ﬁnd out polished surface—say, on copper or that you had an impure motive for glass or something—and select on it trying to have a pure mind. You did it some reflection of light. Now, look at for the same old reason. From the very it and put your eyes out of focus so beginning you were afraid, because you that the bright spot appears to be wanted to play one-up on the universe. fuzzy, like a fuzzy circle. You’ll see a Eventually you see how crazy your definite pattern of blur and you’ll mind is. It can only go in circles. have a wonderful time looking at that. Everything your mind does to get out of Then get your eyes back into focus the trap puts it more securely in the and look at an intense light and go trap. Every step toward liberation ties deep into it, like falling down a funnel you up even more. You started with and at the end of the funnel is this molasses in one hand and feathers in the

SPRING 2017 | 35 How do you get people to trust life? You have to trick them. They won’t jump into the water, so you have to throw them in.

other, and the guru made you clap your been presented to you. You can now hands together and then told you to concentrate, yes, but you discover pick the feathers off. And the more you you’ve been concentrating for the try to do so, the more mess you make. wrong reason, and there’s no way of Meanwhile, as you get more and more doing it for the right reason. involved in this curious process, the Krishnamurti did this to people. He guru tells you how you’re progressing. was a very clever guru. And Gurdjieff, “You attained the 8th stage today. too, although he played the same game Congratulations. Now you only have 56 in a different way. He made his students steps remaining.” And when you get to watch themselves constantly and told that 64th stage, the guru knows how to them to never, never be absentminded. spin it and drag it all out, because you And the Japanese sword teachers do the are ever so hopeful that you’ll get that same thing. Their first lesson is to always thing, just as you might win a prize or be alert—constantly— because you win a special job or great distinction and never know where or when the attack is finally be somebody. That your going to come. Now, do you know what motivation all along, only it’s very happens when you try to always be on spiritual here. It’s not for worldly the alert? You think about being alert— recognition, but you want to be you’re not alert. And you’re a hopeless recognized by the gods and angels—it’s prey to the enemy. So the trick is to be the same story on a higher level. simply awake and relaxed. Then all your So the guru keeps holding out all nerve ends are working and whenever these baits and the student keeps taking the attack comes, you’re ready. The the bait. And the guru holds out more great teachers liken this to a barrel of baits until the student gets the water—the water sits there in the barrel, realization that they’re just running and as soon as you put a hole in the around faster and faster in a squirrel barrel the water just falls out. It doesn’t cage. I mean, the student is making an have to think about it. In the same way, enormous amount of progress, but when the mind is in a proper state, it is they’re not getting anywhere. And this ready to respond in any direction is how the guru tricks you. The guru without any sense of being taut or impresses this realization upon you by anxious. And the minute anything these methods until you finally find out happens, it’s right there, because it that you—as an ego, as what you didn’t have to overcome anything, like ordinarily call your mind—are a mess. coming back from the opposite And you just can’t do this thing. You direction to respond to an attack. See, if can’t do it by any of the means that have you’re set for the attack to come from

36 | PARABOLA over there and it comes from here, you think they have to struggle and strain have to pull back from there and come to have a bowel movement—they think here, but by then it’s too late. So sit in they have to work to make it happen. the middle and don’t expect the attack But all of this is based on a lack of to come from any particular direction. faith—not trusting life. How do you In yoga, you can be watchful and get people to trust life? You have to concentrated and alert, but all that will trick them. They won’t jump into the ever teach you is what not to do—how water, so you have to throw them in. not to use the mind. You have to just And if they’re very unwilling to be let it happen, like going to sleep. You thrown in, they’re going to take diving can’t try to go to sleep. It’s the same lessons or read books about diving or with digesting your food—you can’t do preliminary exercises or stand at the try to digest your food. And it’s the edge of the diving board and inquire same with liberation—you have to let which is the right posture until yourself wake up. When you find out somebody comes up from behind and there isn’t any way of forcing it, maybe kicks them in the butt to get them in you’ll stop forcing it. But most people the water. don’t believe this. They say, “Well, that won’t work for me. I’m very Excerpted from OUT OF YOUR MIND: TRICKSTERS, unevolved. I’m just poor little me and INDEPENDENCE, AND THE COSMIC GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK by Alan Watts. Copyright © 2017 Alan Watts. Preface if I don’t force it nothing will © 2017 Mark Watts. To be published by Sounds happen.” I know some people who True in March 2017.

SPRING 2017 | 37 The Urge to Create

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In 1879, Vincent van Gogh, with hopes of working as a pastor, lived in squalid conditions as a Protestant missionary among coal miners in the Borinage district of Belgium, until he was dismissed for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood.” A disgraced failure—his father wanted him committed to a lunatic asylum—van Gogh faced an abyss of meaninglessness. The passage below details what happened then. –The Editors

LONE, WITHOUT ANY TIES TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD, Vincent continued to shed the familiar, religious, and A social constraints. Family connections that could have led to respectable positions were severed. He eschewed his brother’s encouraging support. He had received no approval from religious institutions for his effort to ease the miners’ lives, an effort that had taken a devastating toll on his personal health. He was weak and ill and without any support. But what he did have was his own humanity and his faith—his faith in the ray from on high (Amsterdam, April 3, 1878). With that little bit of light shining into his own pit of hell he maintained a glimmer of hope. In that cold dark place with nothing to distract him, he finally became aware of a light within his soul, a vital spark—the urge to create. He had

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40 | PARABOLA always had a latent desire to make suffering bearable. The memory of sketches and drawings, which he artworks had helped him see in the sometimes inserted in his letters. Just darkened soot-covered world of the before entering the Borinage he had miners glimpses of scenes worthy of written to Theo that he would really paintings. He had come to the Borinage like to with the ability to see with the eye of an start making rough sketches of one or the artist. This country was unique, other of the many things one meets along the everything speaks, as it were, and is full of way, but considering that it would actually character (Wasmes, December 26, not take me very far and that it would most 1878). Every moment there is something likely keep me from my real work, it is better that moves one intensely (Wasmes, I don’t begin. (Laken, on or about between March 4 and 31, 1879). When November 13 or 15 or 16, 1878) he took his walks through the At the time he wrote these words, labyrinthine streets, lined with grimy immersed in coursework required by the brick houses on either side, or ventured missionary training school, he had beyond the towns where slag piles suppressed his longing. But now, in the obscured the horizon, he was reminded cramped bedroom of the miner’s hut of certain aspects and moods seen in with nothing else he could do, he took great works of art: up a pencil and began to draw far into There is a place nearby from where one can the night, to keep some souvenir and to see in the distance below a large part of the strengthen the thoughts raised Borinage, with the chimneys, mountains of involuntarily by the aspect of things here coal, small workers’ homes, the moving (Cuesmes, August 5, 1879). about of small black figures during the day During the next eight months, by the just like in an ant heap, in the far distance light of a flickering candle, while the dark fir woods with small white workers’ cottages in front of them, a couple of little miner’s children were asleep, Vincent towers in the distance, an old mill etc. sketched. And slowly his spirits began to Usually a kind of fog hangs over it all, or rise, rekindling at the same time the there is the whimsical effect of light and passion for all the art that had fed his dark because of the shadows caused by soul in the past. He found courage and clouds that remind one of paintings by hope, affirmation and inspiration, in the Rembrandt or Michel or Ruisdael. rich store of his remembrances. He had (Wasmes, on or about June 19, 1879) once written to Theo how rich art was, and that if one could remember the The prints that he now hung on the things one had seen, one would never walls of the miner’s bedroom spurred feel alone. For almost three years he had him on. He returned to reading the lived in a place devoid of art, except for books he had with him. And instead of the few prints Theo had sent him. But writing letters to Theo, he relied on this long absence from the world of drawing to strengthen his thoughts and literature and art hadn’t dimmed his reconnect with all that had given him appreciation and need for it. On the the greatest meaning. contrary, that world had remained embedded within his consciousness. Reprinted from Carol Berry’s VINCENT VAN GOGH: HIS SPIRITUAL VISION IN LIFE AND ART (2015) by permission Vincent’s love for art had made his of Orbis Books (www.orbisbooks.com).

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42 | PARABOLA ^åÅáÉåí=ïáëÇçã=çå=Üçï=íç=äáîÉ=êáÖÜíäó=~åÇ=ïÉää The Dao of Meaning

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HO HASN’T WONDERED WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT? For me, the best pointing-at-the-moon answers can be Wfound in the Dao De Jing, written by the Chinese sage Laozi 2,500 years ago. I’ve read many translations of this text over the years, and recently translated it myself, in order to come as close as possible to its underlying bones.

WEI WU WEI

ne of Laozi’s most compelling insights is the concept of wei wu wei. He’s referring to the kind of effortless Oaction that is natural and spontaneous. Literally, wei wu wei means doing without doing, or action without action, which may sound like a paradox at first. “Those who know,” he says, “find fulfillment without effort.”1 His advice? Best to live without controlling, act without expecting, perform well without dwelling on it.

Wei wu wei is akin to Mihaly Csíkszentmihalyi’s concept of flow.2 In an interview with WIRED magazine, Csíkszentmihalyi describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”3

SPRING 2017 | 43 The key to giving up—or at least stopping to question—our judgments about everything that happens is to realize that we don’t have the whole picture.

Basically, Laozi’s message is to do—as Krishnamurti calls “the daily, dull, well as we can—whatever it is we do. insensitive existence, putting up with Then we can move on, knowing we’ve our misery, defending, quarreling, eking done our best: out our life until death comes.” What Behave well, and never mind hiding we are seeking, he says, is “a totally your tracks. different existence, so that there is no Speak well, and forget about blaming division between nature and ourselves, your flaws. between another and ourselves, so that Evaluate well, and there’s no need to there is a heightened, deepened quality keep count. and meaning to life.” How do we get there? ON THE PATH Krishnamurti says, “It can only be brought about when the observer no longer makes an effort to change, hen we are practicing wei wu because he himself is part of what he wei, we are on the right path tries to change. Therefore all action W(dao), and the traveling is on the part of the observer ceases easy. Taking any other path amounts to totally, and in this total inaction there going against the flow. We find ourself is a quite different action.” fighting life, and since we’re a part of Krishnamurti encourages us to start life, we can end up working against simply: “Can I look at a flower by the ourself. As Laozi puts it: wayside or in my room without all the If I took what I know seriously, thoughts arising, the thought that says, I would walk on the wide path ‘It is a rose; I like the smell of it, the and only act with respect. perfume,’ and so on and on and on? Can I just observe without the observer? Though the great path runs smooth If you have not done this, do it, at the and safe, people keep stumbling lowest, most simple level. It isn't really down shadowy byways. the lowest level; if you know how to do Of course, the first thing that Laozi that, you have done everything.”4 tells his readers is that this path can’t be Or, as Laozi describes it: described. The best he can do is to point Simply do, never mind about performing. at it. The best we can do is to pay Simply engage, never mind about difficulties. attention to his hints. Simply taste, and forget about naming When we consider ourselves separate the flavor. from others and from nature, we run the risk of falling into what Jiddu In other words, keep it simple:

44 | PARABOLA Every day you walk the path, No need to go out the door you subtract something. to be mindful of the world.

Subtract and keep subtracting No need to peer through windows in order to let things to see the right way to act. go their own way. The more you go out, remote and distant, Leave things alone; the more you know what’s missing. don’t impose meaning. That’s why those in the know When we do this, our goals are not don’t go anywhere but remain aware separate from the goals of those around us: of what’s not visible, yet apparent. Not seeing, they perceive. Those who know don’t have endless intentions. They treat Not making things happen, other people’s intentions as their own. they get results.

The answer, then, lies in subtracting DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY judgement, trusting our nature, and relaxing into effortless action: he key to giving up—or at Oh least stopping to question— we do nothing. Tour judgments about And the universe takes care of itself. everything that happens is to realize that we don’t have the whole picture. TAIJIQUAN AND THE ZEN CIRCLE A car cuts us off on the freeway, and we’re furious. We learn that it’s driven by a man who’s rushing his hat most daoist of Chinese wife to the hospital to give birth, and martial arts, taiji quan, provides our fury turns into compassion. A Ta wonderful example of this state friend ignores us in the street, and of mind. I perform these graceful steps we’re hurt. We learn that she’s not in my garden ﬁrst thing every morning. wearing her glasses, and we Over the course of thousands of understand that her vision is the mornings, I’ve learned that what’s most issue, not our friendship. Laozi gives valuable is the practice of performing us this reminder: one step at a time, with nothing added. Best to know The body does what it does, while that you don’t know. thoughts come and go freely, and the senses process the world. It’s a moving Not knowing this meditation. It’s wei wu wei in is a problem. (effortless) action. This may seem to pose a Another example of wei wu wei is the quandary. After all, no one is capable enso (or circle) of Zen Buddhist of knowing everything. How, then, calligraphy. This evocative circle results are we to act? Fortunately, the from one or two effortless brushstrokes answer is simple. The answer is in our made by a hand that’s not seeking very nature. perfection.

SPRING 2017 | 45 How different life would be if we stopped labeling our experiences. If we simply lived life instead.

In fact, seeking perfection can be Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy. counter-productive. “Have no fear of perfection—you'll never reach it,” said Grant that I may not seek so much Salvador Dali. Yet for those of us who To be consoled as to console, keep reaching for perfection, the To be understood as to understand, accompanying fear of failure can be To be loved as to love. crippling. No one can avoid failure, but For it is in giving that we receive, at the same time, perhaps failure is also It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, nothing to fear. Here again, Laozi has It is in dying to the self that we are born to good advice: eternal life. According to those who know, problems persist; so, in the end, never mind about problems. Each life is unique, important, a piece of the puzzle. What each of us does is Maybe the real problem lies in the important, and at the same time—on labeling. What is failure, really? As the scale of the universe—insigniﬁcant. Thomas A. Edison noted about his own In the words of Suzuki Roshi, “What we experiments, “I have not failed. I've just are doing here is so important, we better found 10,000 ways that won't work.” not take it too seriously!” How different life would be if we When not taking things too stopped labeling our experiences. If we seriously, a person can accomplish a simply lived life instead. lot, as Laozi tells us: Those who know LIVING A MEANINGFUL LIFE advise taking nothing as important. That way you can accomplish important things. ne conclusion to draw is that it’s more fruitful to live a A bookmark I used to own offered Omeaningful life than to try to another paradox, in beautiful describe the meaning of life. Another calligraphy: “There is plenty of time, way to put this is that the meaning of and each moment counts.” life can be found in how we live our life. This particular moment is only one The Peace Prayer, for example, describes of an infinite number of moments. what a meaningful life might look like: Each person alive right now is only Please, one of seven billion humans on the Make me an instrument of your Peace. planet. And yet, doesn’t everything Where there is hatred, let me sow love; affect everything else? The single flap Where there is injury, pardon; of a butterfly’s wings can alter the Where there is doubt, faith; timing and path of a hurricane half a Where there is despair, hope; world away. Of course, the butterfly is

46 | PARABOLA !$"!!"#$#$" $ $! $! ##$ # $# $ ## "$# $" " $# simply floating around, taking no that I’ll be asked why I wasn’t more like notice of how its flapping might affect Zusha.” the air currents around it, not Following the path that is truly ours worrying about the enormity of what may very well be the easiest—and the it might be setting in motion. hardest—thing we can do. The takeaway? The more we worry, 1 the more we fear failure, the less we are All quotes from the Dao De Jing are from the author’s translation: Laozi, trans. Dian Duchin in touch with our true nature. The story Reed, DAO DE JING: LAOZI’S TIMELESS WISDOM of Rabbi Zusha is a good example of (Soquel: Humanitas Press, 2016). 2 this. His students came to visit him on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, FLOW: THE PSYCHOL- OGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE (New York: Harper his deathbed and found him with tears and Row, 1990). in his eyes. Surprised, they asked him 3 Geirland, John, “Go With The Flow,” interview what was wrong. He replied, “When I with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. WIRED , 4.09. September,1996. die, I know I won’t be asked why I 4 Jiddu Krishnamurti, Second Talk in Saanen, wasn’t more like Moses. But I am afraid Switzerland, 1966.

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48 | PARABOLA ^=í~äÉ=çÑ=ëå~âÉ=Ü~åÇäÉêëI=Ñ~áíÜ=ÜÉ~äÉêëI=~åÇ=ëéÉ~âÉêë=áå=íçåÖìÉë The Turn of the Dial: Seeking God in the Fringes

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And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Mark 16:17-18

N EASTERN KENTUCKY IN THE 1970S, roadside snake pits were a common curiosity. I From Montgomery County to Powell and into Estill, the country roads wound into deep forest and low Appalachian Mountains. We’d watch for the signs—my sisters and I—hand-painted or stenciled wooden boards with the words “SNAKES” or sometimes, “REPTILES.” We’d beg our mother to stop. On occasion she would, and we’d run from pit to pit, shrieking in a terror that was only partial play. My memory is hazy when I attempt to conjure the image of the snake pits: the bright green summer leaves of tall trees; my mother, shaking her head and laughing; the snake man, telling us in his deep holler drawl about each reptile in his charge. I’ve heard that these pits are still there. Eastern Kentucky teems with venomous snakes. It only makes sense that they’re gathered together for a greater purpose.

SPRING 2017 | 49 I’d seen enough healings...to know at a young age that people would do just about anything to get right with the Lord.

Growing up, on Wednesday nights my ears, listening for a pattern to the Mom would take us to Faith Full Gospel language. The speaker was always Church. It was a church that was really a incredibly earnest: this was not two-story clapboard house out in the intentional trickery. After the speech country, and the services were held in ended, people would sing what I suppose was the former living independently and pray out loud until room. The bathroom had an antiquated someone else stood up to translate slide lock I never trusted, and you what had been said. entered and exited the church through a Almost every service had an altar slamming metal kitchen door. I liked call, but it wasn’t for the lost so much going to Faith, because sometimes the as it was for the lame. Our preacher preacher would let me shake the frequently healed bad backs, and a tambourine, and there was always a lot crowd would surround the injured happening at once, unlike our Sunday person and lay hands. Laying hands mornings at the First Baptist. These just meant touching, but “time to lay services were all about noise: loud, hands” seemed to carry a heavier twangy, and lively hymns, lots of weight than a simple touch. The clapping, a rolling chorus of “Praise healing of the bad backs meant that Jesus” and “Hallelujah.” There was a two legs, uneven in length, would be certain cadence to the hallelujahs, a prayed over until the shortened leg ﬂowing out of repetitive sing-song grew to meet the length of the other uttered by those with closed eyes and one. This meant the person was palms pointing to the ceiling, wrists healed. I’d never known that so many cracked back, arms extended. people had legs that were different Hallelujah. The hollering and lengths, and I’d watch this miracle in boisterous singing came ﬁrst, then the sincere amazement. sermon, then lots of swaying and more There was a young man in my town singing that was softer than before and who'd stuck his finger in a live socket more heartfelt. as a baby and walked with a limp ever At this point, when everyone was since. He was a photographer, and my sitting down and it seemed time to go mom always told me that he was a home, someone would stand and begin smart man and that I wasn’t to judge to speak in a language unknown. On him by his gait. I wanted to take him occasion that person would be my with us to Faith Full Gospel Church. mother. This was called speaking in I wanted to see a miracle that I could tongues. This was anointed. This was be certain was real, but mom always when people would get really excited, shook her head at this suggestion. and the soliloquy would continue on “He doesn't believe like we for quite a while. I remember straining believe,” she’d explained.

50 | PARABOLA “So what? Jesus heals the lame,” serpents. He lost the tip of a finger I’d answered. following a strike in 1998, and refused “You have to believe. It’s by your medical treatment for several bites, faith that you are healed, not just including the one that killed him. Each because you are in need of healing.” time, he had prepared a signed letter I couldn’t much argue with that. I refusing medical care, stating that it was wanted to be faithful. I wanted to against his religion. believe. Who was to say what was a Middlesboro is 140 miles south of my miracle, what was the mind, and what hometown. It’s near the Cumberland was pure hopefulness? Gap, where my ancestors came to There were never snakes at Faith, and Kentucky from North Carolina via everyone I knew looked down upon that Tennessee almost 250 years ago. I think kind of lunacy. Yet how many clicks of about Jamie Coots as someone I could the dial did it take to go from straight- have gone to school with, or stood next laced and conservative Southern Baptist to playing the tambourine during a to miracle-performing charismatic? How Wednesday night prayer meeting. many more clicks to handling snakes [a According to an Associated Press article way of showing faith in God's by Travis Loller written after Coots’s protection against harm]? I didn’t know death, an average of five people a year anyone who’d admitted to going to a die from handling snakes as a part of snake-handling church, but I knew they testing their faith, and seven thousand were out there. Why else would the to eight thousand people handle snakes snake pits exist? People talked. The annually. All of these deaths, deeper you went into the mountains of presumably, occur in the Appalachian Eastern Kentucky, the more likely it was region with known snake-handling you could find such a church. I’d seen churches: Alabama, Kentucky, enough healings and heard enough Tennessee, West Virginia, and South tongues spoken to know at a young age Carolina. Of these states, it’s only legally that people would do just about protected in West Virginia. It’s illegal anything to get right with the Lord. everywhere else. Gregory James “Jamie” Coots, a Those who take up serpents believe preacher I never met, was born twenty God will protect them from harm if days after my own Kentucky birth back their faith is strong enough. Most who in 1971. He died on February 15, handle snakes aren’t bitten, which they 2014, from a snakebite during a church take as a sign of their devotion. Those service at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in who are bitten often survive, yet many Jesus Name in Middlesboro, Kentucky. do not. Handlers, in general, are He came from a long line of snake- adamant believers in fate, and subscribe handling preachers. His son, Cody to the notion that God takes each Coots, 21, was bitten three months after person at their designated time. They his father's death and survived. The continue to choose to incorporate elder Coots starred in a National snakes into their worship services Geographic reality show, Snake regardless of the danger or the law. Salvation, and believed fervently that he What is it, deep in these Appalachian followed God’s will by taking up hills, that instills such intense religious

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fervor, turning the dial further away And yet the people of Kentucky are from mainstream religion? Eastern resilient, and witty, and musical. They Kentucky is remote, poor, and littered can also be despondent, cynical, and with pockets of hopelessness: burned undereducated. They are hopeful out single-wide trailers, blasted when they can be. For the most part, mountainsides laid waste by they are fiercely loyal to place and mountaintop removal, and the illnesses heritage, and concerned that the and drug addictions treated in the younger generation may be moving regional emergency rooms. Some say away too quickly because of the the elevated rate of cancer and early absence of jobs. Many who stay turn mortality in Eastern Kentucky is because to the faith of their forefathers for of the environmental destruction and comfort, and this Old Time Religion pollution brought by the mining can include the handling of snakes. industry. Drinking tap water is Sometimes, a traditional Pentecostal discouraged, and public drinking church or non-denominational fountains are sometimes closed. Sludge charismatic church, like the one of my and waste from the blasted youth, is enough. There is no doubt mountaintops ﬁlls the formerly fertile that religious beliefs are held closely streams and valleys. Shattering here. Family Bibles are handed down mountains to expose hidden seams of for generations and often serve as the coal is quicker and easier than best record of ancestry. Church traditional, underground mining. leaders are most likely conservative,

52 | PARABOLA passionate, and above all, literal in their found photos of the interior of the interpretation of the Bible. church at abandonedonline.com: the The people of eastern Kentucky are pew-less space seemed vast and small deeply tied to the land. Because of the simultaneously. The pipes from the remoteness of the region, they often rely organ and the peeling golden walls of on vegetable gardens and family farms the sanctuary stood in hazy bright light for subsistence. Many men and women streaming through the clear panes that hunt for food, not for sport, and a large replaced the original colorful stained buck or elk can last the winter with glass. My childhood rushed to meet me. plenty to share. Most of the counties in I’d been baptized here in 1977 and the region are dry—meaning no legal scolded for leaving a service early in alcohol can be purchased there, 1980 because my friend dared me to go furthering the proliferation of the check the time and I was bored enough stereotypical moonshiner with his own to do so. I’d sung alto in the choir, still or the bootlegger who runs played hand bells at Christmas, and liquor over the mountains from wet dressed in scratchy bath towels as a counties. At one point in the 1980s, shepherd for a Nativity play. I’d married the mountains were covered in the here in 1995 wearing my mother's bright green leaf of illegal marijuana. wedding dress, feeling very much like a Not so much anymore—I’d been told child playing dress up. once at a nondescript liquor store This is where I learned to sit without outside of Hazard. wiggling, to doodle on tithing “Pills is cheaper”" the longhaired envelopes, and to stage whisper down a clerk told me. pew: “What's for lunch?” We sang from “That so,” I answered, unsure if he the Baptist Hymnal: “Just As I Am,” was offering to sell me something under “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “Amazing Grace.” the table to go with my bourbon, or if I learned about Shadrach, Meshach, and he was just making conversation. “DEA Abednego here, about baby Moses flies over us now,” he said, his hand, turned loose in a basket in the rushes. I held flat, moved between us like an learned of Ruth and Naomi, Esther the airplane. “They can see the pot. Can't Queen, and Mary and Martha. Bible see the oxy from the skies though.” Drill leaders taught me how to locate In downtown Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, Psalms, or Leviticus, or Romans with a the First Baptist Church stood at the quick flick of the fingers. I also corner of Howard Avenue and High learned—in obvious conflict to my Street from 1914 to 2000, when the Wednesday night teachings at Faith Full congregation abandoned the old Gospel—that modern-day miracles did building for a new sanctuary near the not exist, gifts of the spirit were a thing bypass. My grandparents were married of olden days, and that above all, proper in this church, as were my own parents, behavior in church was of the highest as was I. Although the shell of the red virtue. There were no tambourines at brick structure still stands, when the the First Baptist Church. When things congregation moved, they stripped the would get spirited, an elderly man from building of its stained glass windows the back of the sanctuary would bellow and, I assume, anything of value. I a low and loud “Amen.” Beyond that

SPRING 2017 | 53 occasional outburst, the sermons what, pray tell, was I to do about the continued dogmatically on, the drinking of all that moonshine? congregation sitting primly and If my younger sister and I were to completely silent. We didn’t even clap. walk downtown, we’d cut through an I knew that although our alley between the church and their Wednesday night excursions were not a educational building. This is how we secret, we weren’t exactly to talk about learned that the Catholic Church was them openly, either. None of my never locked, and more than once we extended family attended a second tested the doors to sneak inside their church and they remained fully loyal to sanctuary to see what we could find. the First Baptist, as far as I knew. Yet Church interiors were fascinating. Faith we continued, my sisters, my mother Full Gospel’s uncovered windows, and me, to drive out county roads creaky hardwood floors, and folding once a week for faith healings and chairs were in stark contrast to the high jubilance, tongues and tambourines. It golden walls and gleaming stained glass was like an affair: we were committed of the First Baptist. But the Catholic to the First Baptist for the long haul, sanctuary was like nothing we’d seen but the allure of Wednesday nights anywhere else. The crucified Jesus, kept us coming back. hanging high on the wall and life-sized, In both places—the First Baptist and bled with an anguished face, spear in the Faith Full Gospel—one thing that was side, nails through palms. My younger certain was the surety of the church sister and I would creep soundlessly, our leaders. Neither place gave much mouths agape. All of the crosses we'd credence to doubt. How was I to rectify ever known had been old and wooden the two conflicting versions of the same and not draped in the body of a bloody Bible? How was I to discern who was Christ. Beautiful Mary in her blue robe right and who was wrong? Even on this looked serenely passive and accepting of small scale of theological seeking, I her fate. peppered my mother with questions. Once, a woman—perhaps a nun— What about Presbyterians? Episcopals? found my sister and I in the sanctuary Goodness, what of the Catholics? The and scolded us loudly. We ran for knowledge of the existence of Muslims home, our hearts pounding, our souls or Hindus was outside of my worldview, once again in some sort of jeopardy and although I’d heard of Jews, I’d even though we weren’t sure if never actually met one, yet agreed with sneaking around was a real sin or not. a nod to feel sympathetic for their We decided that it had to be, because plight. I spent serious time ruminating the woman had scared us. She on the concept of burning in hell— wouldn't have yelled if our intentions leaving little time to ponder the fate of a and curiosity had been pure. Muslim or Jew. Who would make it to The faith of a Catholic was just as heaven and who would burn for all foreign to me as a child as the faith of a eternity? And then, what about me? My snake-handler. Up close, I found sins weighed heavy on my heart. What if Catholicism comforting, if a bit austere I’d forgotten a sin and hadn’t asked for and frightening. Their bloody icons had proper forgiveness? What then? And stunned my sister and me, the same way

54 | PARABOLA the thought of lifting a snake from a pit and curious. It was as though I were and holding it toward heaven elicited speaking in tongues: how foreign this shrieks of terror. It was the dial of must sound to their ears, and how religion turning once again, yet nothing familiar to my own. like snake handling, not at all. I’ve often wondered what my I graduated from high school in 1989 mother was looking for on the and started college before my country road to Faith Full Gospel eighteenth birthday. The greatest luxury Church. What did my sister and I seek of moving away from home, beyond the by trespassing in Catholic spaces? lack of a curfew, was my decadent choice What did I find in the stability and to sleep in on Sunday mornings. I didn’t routine of the Southern Baptist seek out a church, or join the Baptist Church? Religion is the road, but the Student Union. I was ready to get away spirit is what takes the journey. I from what I’d come to see as a tedious found that religion can be both commitment to prayer meetings, Sunday something to cling to and something school, and the multitude of choirs. to flee. It can create holy spaces and I married. I moved away. I birthed misguided teachings and so many my own daughters, and a few years ago questions. I learned that to seek God I became a Methodist. Slowly, I began is perhaps the important part— to embrace some of the indoctrination whether it’s through the Bible or the from my childhood as a blessing. I Torah or the Koran. This belief has could answer the theological questions shaped my spirituality far more than from the mouths of my babes with the strictures of my childhood, or Biblical authority. I could discern a perhaps, because of it. false prophet from miles away. I found It took time and distance for me to that church could be comforting and see things clearly, and I’m not sure how reliable and a place for the community clearly I see things, even now. Perhaps to come together. And I found a way it’s because each religious inﬂuence of to turn the dial somewhere closer to my youth seemed to be at odds with the where I felt comfortable with my own others. I now embrace each person’s story and my own path. Not my spiritual journey as their own, and not mother’s or the faith of my childhood, mine to question. I’ve found my own but rather a place I could find comfort path, and it’s full of doubt, and and peace within my doubt. questions, and seeking. Perhaps that’s A few summers ago I took my why Jamie Coots picked up snakes, held daughters to Natural Bridge, Kentucky, them toward the ceiling of his small in Powell County. We drove the road church in front of his congregation, and where my sisters and I would shriek at prayed for God to show him pure the snake pits, and my trained eye enough in heart to be worthy of love. watched around each curve for a hand- He had his own questions and doubts, painted wooden board nailed to a tree how could he not? And as he died, the reading “SNAKE.” I never found it. venom clutching his forty-two-year-old Instead, I told my girls the stories of the heart and claiming his life, who’s to say pits and of the churches that lift that he wasn’t just as worthy of God's serpents, and they listened, wide-eyed grace as any of the rest of us?

SPRING 2017 | 55 56 | PARABOLA The Truth Of Impermanence p~ãìÉä=_ÉêÅÜçäò

^êí=Äó=mÉã~=k~ãÇçä=qÜ~óÉ

tÜ~í=Ü~ééÉåÉÇ=~ÑíÉê=íÜÉ=~ìíÜçê=êÉíìêåÉÇ=Ñêçã=eÉää

Some years ago, Samuel Bercholz, the founder of Shambhala Publications and a longtime Buddhist practitioner, underwent sextuple coronary bypass surgery. In the after- math of the surgery, he died and, in his words, underwent a horriﬁc “pilgrimage to Hell.” The following excerpt from his memoir, A GUIDED TOUR OF HELL, picks up his story after returning to life from the Buddhist Hell Realm.

VER THE DAYS, my body adjusted to the pain, and I wanted to get out of the hospital and recuperate at home. I was Oadvised to walk and exercise as much as possible after going home and to drastically change my dietary habits. The doctor warned that my spiritual life wasn’t going to be much good if I didn’t take care of my physical health as well. The men and women on the nursing staff who helped guide me toward recovery were a band of angelic beings, putting their patients’ needs before their own needs and preferences. I have such deep appreciation for their dedication and their willingness to deal so directly with messy situations, both physical and emotional.

SPRING 2017 | 57 I told him I was much better. “So soon?” “Yes, Rinpoche.” “Well, Sam. So you think you are going to live forever? Again?”

Finally the day arrived for me to leave was just too easy to return to my the hospital. I couldn’t wait. It was 120 habitual ways. There was nothing to degrees Fahrenheit outside. Blazing. I do but just keep practicing with faith was wheeled to my car and brought and diligence, to burn out the home. It was going to be hard to do any confusions that obstruct awakening. walking for rehabilitation with the temperature so high. fter a month, I was well enough The recovery period at home was to go to Thinley Norbu arduous; it was especially difficult to A Rinpoche’s house to join with get a normal night’s sleep. I would just him and a small group of his students in collapse at various times during the day an evening meditation session. Rinpoche or night. No position was comfortable welcomed me with a big smile and warm to lie or sit or stand in. Everything was greetings. I was so very happy to be torturous. Outside our air-conditioned together with everyone again. home, it was like an oven. When you In coming to this part of my story, I opened the front door, you were can’t help recalling the unusual almost knocked over by the onslaught circumstances in which I happened to of heat. Ivan took me for daily walks enter the orbit of Thinley Norbu. an hour before sunrise since that was Several years after the passing of the coolest part of the day. Strength Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of my crept back into my body, and gradually work colleagues, Brian, asked me if I’d the pain subsided. like to meet his teacher, Dodrupchen The experience of hell seemed far Rinpoche, who was arriving from Asia at behind me now, although I knew I Boston’s Logan Airport. I accepted the would never see this world in the same invitation, and we went to the airport. way again. In spite of that, I was The plane was late. Brian became quite shocked that my bad habits of nervous at some point and informed me distraction, time wasting, and pettiness that Thinley Norbu Rinpoche had just all reasserted themselves with a entered the terminal. Would I like to be vengeance. Even though I had introduced to him? I said yes. I had read witnessed so vividly the reality of the Thinley Norbu Rinpoche’s book THE four noble truths—the existence of SMALL GOLDEN KEY and had been suffering, the cause of suffering, the impressed by its depth. possibility of the cessation of suffering, Rinpoche, accompanied by two and the ways to overcome suffering—it attendants, immediately approached

58 | PARABOLA Brian and greeted him. Brian Weeks later I went to Europe to do introduced me, but Rinpoche paid no a solitary meditation retreat. At the attention. After some more end of the retreat, I received a letter conversation, Brian again tried to from a close friend, to whom I had introduce us. Rinpoche turned to me described the airport encounter. He and started shouting at the top of his urged me to follow up on that lungs about how stupid and arrogant I encounter, telling me that Rinpoche was, thinking I knew anything about was making me an offer. either Dharma or “crazy wisdom.” To After returning to America, I went say the least, I was stunned. to see Thinley Norbu Rinpoche and Suddenly I remembered instructions requested to become his student. After that Trungpa Rinpoche had given me considering it for several hours, he many years before, on what to do if I agreed. First I visited him on many were ever accosted by a high lama. At occasions and received teachings from the time, I thought this a very strange him in person and often on the prospect; why would I ever be accosted telephone. His insight and kindness by a lama? Nonetheless, I listened were unimaginable. He filled in all the carefully to Trungpa Rinpoche’s very areas that Trungpa Rinpoche had speciﬁc instructions about exactly what suggested I should look into. For at to say. least fifteen of the twenty-one years I now remembered this advice and that I was Thinley Norbu’s student, I followed the instructions to a T. At once lived in his community and practiced Thinley Norbu Rinpoche began with him nearly every evening. I was so laughing very hard. He then said, fortunate to have the opportunity to “Okay, okay.” study under such wondrous teachers. Dodrupchen Rinpoche finally Now our reunion after my near-death arrived and was greeted by everyone encounter was full of poignant meaning. there. One of the ladies attending Just as we were about to begin the Thinley Norbu Rinpoche then asked meditation session, Rinpoche casually me if I’d like to meet with Rinpoche asked me how I was feeling. I told him I at the terminal at the opposite end of was much better. the airport. “So soon?” I made my way to the far terminal “Yes, Rinpoche.” and saw Rinpoche sitting there. His “Well, Sam. So you think you are demeanor had changed, and he going to live forever? Again?” beckoned me to sit down next to him. Rinpoche had to remind me again of He told me how much he liked the the truth of impermanence, to make atmosphere of airports; they were like sure. It was a bolt of wisdom-lightning bardos, transitional places where people directed into my reborn heart with passed from one place to another. We exquisite precision. went on to converse about Buddhism From THE GUIDED TOUR OF HELL by Samuel and politics. That time together made a Bercholz © 2016 Illustrations © 2016 by Pema Namdol Thaye. Reprinted in arrangement with great impression upon me. Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

SPRING 2017 | 59 Viktor Frankl and the Search for Meaning: A Conversation with Alexander Vesely and Mary Cimiluca

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

―Viktor E. Frankl, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

60 | PARABOLA “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

―Viktor E. Frankl, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

Few books of the last century have had a greater impact on our quest for meaning than Viktor Frankl’s MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. This all-time bestseller was written by a Jewish man who had just lost everything in the Holocaust. When Frankl, emaciated from concentration camps, returned to his beloved Vienna, no one was there to meet him. His mother had been gassed at Auschwitz. His brother had been killed in another camp. His wife, Tilly, had starved to death in the women’s camp at Bergen-Bergen. Now, he wondered, what was the point of his life?

“I decided not to commit suicide—at least not before I had reconstructed my first book, THE DOCTOR AND THE SOUL….” After Frankl finished that book, friends who read it asked him to write another, this time about his experience in the concentration camps. He poured out MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING in just nine days, weeping in an empty room with windows bombed out from the war. Seventy years later, the book remains a classic textbook for college students and a guidepost for people all faiths. A nun told me that Mother Teresa encouraged her novitiates to read MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING as part of their spiritual formation. The book was listed as one of the ten most influential books in America by the Library of Congress.

As a professor, I have assigned MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING to college students for over twenty years. Reeently I invited Frankl’s grandson Alexander Vesely to screen his ﬁlm VIKTOR & I at the university. I interviewed him and Mary Cimiluca, Frankl family advisor and CEO of Noetic Films, which produced the movie, for a forthcoming book.

–Fran Grace

SPRING 2017 | 61

cê~å=dê~ÅÉW Did your grandfather see your meaningful if this man had those potential as a ﬁlmmaker? fifty bucks?” ^äÉñ~åÇÉê=sÉëÉäóW=He actually gave me my first video camera! It’s a funny story cdW Frankl shared his money easily? about a side of him that we all knew. ^sW=To such a point that my parents He was a very generous man. One told my sister and me not to utter time he was in a radio store. There anything that could be bought in his was a man in the store asking to see presence! Not to say, “I’d like this or various models of radios and the that.” Because he would go buy it. prices. Hearing the prices, the man There was only one time that I said, “Oh forget it, I can’t afford it.” consciously broke that rule. I was So my grandfather, standing next to fourteen, and video cameras were him, said, “Pick the one you like, I’m starting to come down in price. I said, going to pay for it.” He bought the “It would be really great to have one man a radio, but it wasn’t just to be of these video cameras.” A few days “nice.” It was for the meaning of it. later, as I knew it would, the phone He said, “I have the money, what’s rang and my grandfather said, “Tell the most meaningful place for my Alex to come over.” So I went over money to be? Do I need the extra and he said, “I heard that you need a fifty bucks or would it be more video camera and I’m going to make

62 | PARABOLA Frankl said, “Never compare suffering. Everyone has their own Auschwitz.” that happen.” There was a discussion vacuum.” I decided to go back to work with my parents, of course. They in a business I owned that did recording knew what I was doing. But by that for conferences all over world. That’s time it was too late! I shot a lot of how I met Alex, in 2008. footage of my grandfather with that The work of Frankl for me is camera, some of which you see in personal. His work saved my life. VIKTOR & I. cdW How did Frankl help you recover from cdW Mary, what is your story? your breakdown? j~êó=`áãáäìÅ~W=I read MAN’S SEARCH FOR j`W=We all have to face suffering, and MEANING in college in the 1960s and then we have to realize that ours may be I met Viktor Frankl in 1987. But it different from another’s. Frankl said, wasn’t until 2008 that I really “got” “Never compare suffering. Everyone Frankl—my life fell out from under me. has their own Auschwitz.” He always One after the other, every member of put himself on the same level as those my family died. When I thought it he encountered. couldn’t get any worse, my best friend Frankl gave us three ways to uncover was brutally murdered and I had to go meaning. “Creative” way—write a book, identify the body. I lost my mind and make a movie, create a business, etc. landed in a psych ward in D.C. I was “Experiential” way—encounter another mandated to stay for twenty-one days person, love them in their singularity and be in the care of a psychiatrist. He and uniqueness, or go somewhere that said, “I want you to read this book, changes your life. “Attitudinal” way— MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING.” I said, “Get this is the path for those who face out of here with that book, I know all unavoidable suffering such as an about that book, it’s not going to save incurable illness or the death camps. You me now!” But he told me, “Your life can’t escape the condition, but you can parallels his and someday you’ll realize choose your attitude toward it and ﬁll it it.” That was true. with meaning: an inner triumph. All He let me out when I wrote up my three of these ways helped me to “business plan” for a new life. At that uncover the meaning in my life. point, I was safe from suicide. At ﬁfty- eight, I wasn’t fond of change. But, six cdW What is logotherapy [the school of weeks later, I had sold my house, moved existential therapy developed by Frankl]? to a sunny place across the country, ^sW=Logos comes from the Greek word knowing no one, sight unseen, to retire “meaning”; therapy is “healing”: at the beach. My feeling of being settled “Healing through meaning.” Frankl lasted three months. I started to created logotherapy as a young deteriorate, sitting at home crying. It’s psychiatrist working with suicidal what Frankl calls an “existential patients, before he was deported to the

SPRING 2017 | 63 My grandfather emphasized that it’s not about “having what you need to live” but asking yourself, “What am I living for?”

concentration camps. We are meaning- There’s a Hitler and a Mother Teresa oriented beings, and we long for in all of us, he would say. And it’s a meaning. If we struggle, we will personal decision which of the two become better if we find something we’re going to let ourselves become. meaningful that fills what he called the “existential vacuum.” cdW What is Frankl’s message to young Although he struggled to have faith people, when depression, suicide, and drug in humankind after the war, Frankl overdoses are at an all-time high? ended up, in logotherapy, afﬁrming a ^sW=He saw it as a prerogative of youth theory of humanity that seeks to elicit to question the meanings and values the potential for good and for meaning. handed down from previous He would always assume the best in generations. As a youth, my others, even those who assumed the grandfather questioned the worst about him. This is a basis in his “orthodoxies” of his day. His life was theory of logotherapy: to look for the challenging. But he never gave up on best in people. He would say, “If you life. Or on himself. He said that it was take a man as he is, you make him our responsibility to find the meaning worse. If you take a man as he can be, in what we face. “We all have a will to you help him become who he can be, meaning in us.” He said that the “will the best version of who he is.” And of to pleasure” (Freud) and the “will to course he meant “women” too—he power” (Adler) do not define the used the language of the time. human being. They do not bring He was not interested in the worst happiness or fulfillment. If you try to version of anyone and how we can pursue happiness for its own sake, it analyze that. My grandfather focused will elude you. Happiness “ensues” in on the “best version” of you and when you fulfill something that is acted as if you were already there. This meaningful to you. It is through that had an uplifting effect on people. seemingly paradoxical process of Still, he wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t one- “self-transcendence”—forgetting sided. I want to be clear that he didn’t oneself—that real “self-actualization” deny the horrors of humanity. How becomes possible. could he? He had come out of the The will to meaning is there in worst savagery. He would say: “After everyone, but sometimes it gets warped. all, man is that being who invented Other things cover it over, and you have the gas chambers of Auschwitz; to uncover it. Always—even in old age. however, he is also that being who My grandfather really started going at entered those gas chambers upright, age sixty! He started taking ﬂying with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema lessons when he was sixty-six. He was Yisrael on his lips.” always open to new ways of seeing the

64 | PARABOLA world and experiencing himself. The First, he said, if you don’t see a opportunities for meaning are different meaning, the meaning of the hour is to at every stage of your life. go find one, seek, be on a quest. Make Abraham Maslow, in his “hierarchy of it a priority. Then, if you still don’t see needs,” said that once basic needs (food, it over a long period of time, and shelter) are met, then the intangibles perhaps you are even contemplating such as love, meaning, and self- suicide, then the meaning of the hour actualization can be fulfilled. But my becomes to at least stay alive despite grandfather disagreed. He told Maslow the apparently meaningless situation how people did not have their “basic” just so that you will still be around needs met in the concentration camps, when meaning again becomes visible. but it was the “higher” needs (i.e., There’s never a situation where there is meanings, love, and values) that proved no meaning, if you give it time and to be much more relevant to their look close enough. Let’s say you are chance of survival. Maslow revised his going through severe depression and ideas and said, “Frankl is right.” My you can’t go out and search for a grandfather emphasized that it’s not meaning. If you commit to staying about “having what you need to live” alive, you will then be here when your but asking yourself, “What am I living meaning is made clear. People who for?” The most affluent societies have all attempt suicide and survive say they their basic needs met, but they lack eventually did find a meaning and are something to live for, and neurotic glad they are still alive to live it out. disorders tend to increase. cdW People criticize Frankl for saying there cdW Your grandfather was very popular at is meaning to be found in the American universities. Packed concentration camp. Is that what he said? auditoriums. What did he say that struck ^sW=No. That’s a misunderstanding. He such a chord? wrote very concisely. He wanted to ^sW=Frankl said there are three problems make his books as simple as possible, so facing youth. One is aggression, killing that anybody could read them. But then and harming each other. Look at all of people take an already boiled-down the violence. Then there is depression, statement, remove a key phrase and say to the point of suicide, wanting to die. something like, “Your grandfather said And the third is addiction, trying to Auschwitz had a meaning too!” That is escape from life through pleasure, a distortion of what he said. He said, “If diversion—drugs, drinking, any kind of you are confronted with unavoidable excessive behavior. suffering, what can you learn from the situation? What meaning can we now cdW What did he say was the way out of squeeze out of this seemingly these problems? meaningless situation?” He did not say ^sW=Meaning orientation. If you have the situation itself was meaningful. But meaningful tasks to fulfill, you will not maybe a meaning can be derived by hurt yourself. If you see that your life understanding what led to the has meaning, then you respect that life, Holocaust, so we have a chance to you feel a responsibility to preserve it. prevent it from ever happening again.

SPRING 2017 | 65 .&+-,0.,0/(+,/.'0 /('-0--(+$0/(#/,0$0$0 /(0",/(')&'.

66 | PARABOLA jÉÉí=~=ã~å=áãéçëëáÄäÉ=íç=Åä~ëëáÑó Laurie oáÅÜ~êÇ=tÜáíí~âÉê

NE OF MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN SAN FRANCISCO was of being flagged down by a stranger as I drove toward the intersection of OStanyan and Frederick Streets at the edge of Golden Gate Park. My friend Malcolm Hall and I, both college students, had driven up the coast highway from Los Angeles in my 1953 Plymouth. The year was 1965. We were headed toward the Haight-Ashbury. Maybe thirty yards short of the intersection, I saw him standing on the curb, a disheveled young man, not quite in the hippie mold. He was looking directly at me it seemed, and gesturing emphatically, an incongruous grin on his face. As the car moved closer, my expression must have revealed my uncertainty because he nodded his head. Yes. It was me he was gesturing to. I turned to Malcolm with a look, “should we?” Malcolm was non- committal. I pulled over. The young man walked up to us still smiling and, without a word, pointed again. I stared in puzzlement. At this he nodded his head and, to clarify matters, repeated the pointing. “What do you mean?” I managed to ask. “Donuts!” He said. “Do you guys like donuts?” I saw it then, a donut shop right ahead of us at the intersection. Whatever threat this smiling stranger—maybe five foot eight—might represent stemmed more from his assault on my sense of social convention than anything else. Besides, there were two of us. The hippie revolution was in full flower and things were going on that crossed a lot of boundaries. Wasn’t this, in some basic way, part of the idea? I parked the car and Malcolm and I walked over to the donut shop with our new friend. Taking a cue from him, it would seem nothing could have been more exciting than getting some glazed donuts and maybe a coffee together, the three of us! This was something I could never have dreamt up on my own, an adventure both too banal and too transgressive at the same time.

SPRING 2017 | 67 Walking in, we found a booth and sat looked at us with a silent grin, not down, Malcolm and I facing the making small talk to smooth things stranger across the table. out. When we finished our donuts, I “What’s your name?” was happy to escape. “Laurie.” When the morning came to head That’s a girl’s name, I couldn’t help back to LA we found the address, a thinking. “How do you spell that?” boarded-up house. Approaching Laurie just stared at me with his big cautiously, I pried back a piece of smile, and nodded. plywood. “Hey Laurie!” I shouted He had a scraggly beard and his teeth into the shadows. After a couple were uneven. of tries an answer came back from “How do you spell that?” I asked the shadows and, sure enough, again. Laurie appeared. “L-a-u-r-i-e.” The smile remained “You guys!” He was not expecting along with his direct gaze on us both. us. We’d awakened him. “Come in,” he He didn’t seem uncomfortable, at least. said. Enough light was coming in here “Do you live around here?” and there to permit our seeing a An awkward conversation hitched dilapidated couch, old coffee table and a along for a few minutes and then he couple of chairs. said, “Let’s get some donuts. Don’t you “Wow,” he said, just looking at us. guys want some?” “You guys actually came back.” What “Sure.” I said, getting up. “Can we routines of betrayal put our simple act in get you some?” such a light? I couldn’t help wondering. “Thanks! Maybe some coffee, too,” “Do you guys want to listen to some he said. of my songs?” I don’t think I’d ever met a street “What about Monterey?” I asked. person before. In 1965 I’m not sure No, he couldn’t go down there today. that phrase had even come into usage. But did we want to hear some of There were tramps and bums and, by his music? then, beats, beatniks and of course, most Where I come from, you don’t immediately, hippies. But in Laurie’s refuse certain things and this seemed case, no categories quite ﬁt. This was a like one of those moments. Laurie situation I’d have to face without them. disappeared and returned with an old acoustic guitar. His singing wasn’t so truggling to relate as we ate our good. That was my first reaction, but donuts, we swapped basic I listened and then something else Sinformation. We told him we were came in; it’s what I remember most. visiting and would be heading back to He finished his song and said, “I've LA in a few days. Were we going to pass got a tape of more of my songs.” through Monterey? he wondered. Reaching for a beat up tape player, he Could we drop him off there? We told said, “Hey, wait here. I’ll be right Laurie we’d check in with him on our back,” and disappeared into the way out of town and he gave us an darkness of the abandoned house. address. The conversation hitched Malcolm and I sat listening to the along. When it faltered, Laurie just tape player and its tiny speaker. Yes,

68 | PARABOLA the same quality I’d heard before was Holding Company with Janis Joplin coming through it, too. If I had to often performed for free. Laurie pick one word for it, it would be sometimes jumped up on stage and something like heartbreaking. tried to grab a mike to join in on My encounter with Laurie, as brief harmonica. His harmonica playing as it was, left unforgettable wasn’t any better than his guitar impressions. Moreover, by a twist of playing, but he seemed unfazed by fate, it was not the last I’d see of him. such considerations. He’d always get In fact, it was just the beginning. ushered off the stage, but I couldn’t help noticing that the band members THREE YEARS LATER all seemed to know Laurie and never seemed much upset with his antics. A longer account of my friendship y 1968 I’d lived in San Francisco with Laurie is for another time. But his for two years and had recently freedom from worry about what others Bmoved in with a woman I’d might think is one of his qualities I fallen in love with. In North Beach, remember most clearly. It was she’d cut quite a ﬁgure. Besides being something I witnessed time and again in tall and beautiful, she’d become a bit of many different ways. Perhaps this quality a celebrity among the locals. One of the struck me so much because of my own characters Karen had become friends lack in that regard. There were many with was named Laurie Seagel. other things I learned about him that “You know Laurie?” I asked in surprised me. He’d been a gifted astonishment. “Laurie Seagel?” philosophy student at Stanford Karen and I lived at the top of Vallejo University and related amazing stories Street on Telegraph Hill and I began to about his time spent with Gregory run into Laurie regularly. Sometimes we Bateson’s family, Richard Alpert and had Laurie over for others. dinner along with From time to time, street poet Johnny Laurie would say Woodrose, who I’d something with a met while running a strong inﬂection of poetry program in Zen. I remember the basement of a asking him about it. church near Haight Yes, he used to love St. Before my move being around Suzuki to North Beach I’d Roshi, the head of the occasionally seen San Francisco Zen Laurie at free Center. He told me concerts in Golden about having a meal Gate Park where there one day. The The Jefferson monks were having a Airplane, Buffalo silent lunch and he Springfield and Big managed to join the .-,0.0+*-0 $0.%#-0 Brother and the . 0",.0"/'&))%-0 )+).( group, but Laurie

SPRING 2017 | 69 wasn’t interested in keeping the Talilah. He’d become a social worker. silence. He kept attempting Why didn’t I come over and visit? As the conversation with the monks sitting at next few years passed, I got more table with him. Finally one of the messages. First there was one child, monks complained. “If he’s going to Hadar, then Sagi then a third. I have talk, why can’t the rest of us?” Suzuki forgotten the name. replied, “For Laurie, it’s allowed.” Then a few years later, I got a call Laurie was a man impossible from Talila. Laurie had died from liver to classify. failure. She told me a story about Laurie’s social work in Israel. She told iven his talents, whatever me how hard it was, the low pay. He obstacles stood in the way of worked with addicts and others, and was Gconventional success must have much loved, she said. People thought he been powerful. But the most obvious had mysterious powers. She told me of a problem he faced was addiction. He’d woman who wanted to have children. been shooting up amphetamines at least She had tried everything. No luck. But since I’d first met him in 1965. He’d one day Laurie met with her and held suffered from hepatitis at least once if her hand. “You are going to have not two or three times. Listening to his children,” he told her. “Don’t worry.” stories, I learned that he’d been arrested Shortly thereafter, Talilah told me, the several times, too. He’d been severely woman conceived. She did have a child. beaten at least once while in jail by I don’t remember exactly when another inmate and had also been Laurie gave me a copy of a manuscript beaten more than once by police. He he’d written, ALL MEN SHALL BE GODS, but I went through difficult times, but was still have it. For years, I’ve wanted to always far more dangerous to himself publish a particular section from it, a than to anyone else. By 1968 the years remarkable account of an experiment in of physical abuse were showing up in living he carried out in San Francisco in mental as well as physical symptoms. the early 1960s before he fell under the Laurie’s future appeared grim indeed. sway of amphetamines. I feel compelled Then one day, I got a call from to underline how striking I find this Laurie. He’d been in Napa State singular inquiry to have been. It’s an Hospital detoxing and now was out. ontological adventure that could easily Somehow he’d managed to get an have remained untold and I’m grateful, airline ticket to Israel. “It’s my last finally, to be able to share it with others. chance,” he told me. Could he borrow a Here is that excerpt: sleeping bag to take with him? I wondered if it was a flight of fancy, Laurie Seagel writes: but a few days later, Laurie showed up I decided to try to find out what were at the door. I handed over the sleeping man’s basic needs. I would live without bag, we embraced, and I wished him the most things I was accustomed to and see best of luck. what it would be like. I decided to give Laurie did go to Israel. He joined a up words; I would only say “yes,” “yes” Kibbutz. A year later, I got a letter from to every question, nothing more, a nod him. He had married a beautiful Israeli, of the head would usually suffice. I

70 | PARABOLA .0*.#&-&0)(0+*-0 /)!*+$0 /(0",/(')&'. 0*.+.!,/*00 &/-%%0 '*#%

would give up things; sandals, a thin the Cellar Jazz Club, evenings. Still later shirt and a thin pair of pants would be some nights after the Cellar closed, we enough. I knew I could adjust to sojourned across town to the Black temperatures in San Francisco through Fillmore district where jazz was played bodily relaxation. The fewer clothes the until early morning at Jimbo’s Bop City. better; I would worry about changing Or I’d go off by myself, as most of the when the need arose. Nothing in my others went home. pockets, nothing, no money, no When Cassandra’s closed, I’d cross identification, nothing. And no place. I the street where a small cafe was good would break the habit of thinking for a short stop. The small hours of the “where” and “where to?” All places morning, three to five, I’d spend in a would be equal. I would try to learn to variety of regular ways. Lying among be comfortable anywhere. the empty bins in the Italian bakery on I hid a sleeping bag in the bushes Grant just above Green, I watched the near Coit Tower, the highest point on bakers working, kneading, arranging, Telegraph Hill, though I ended up shoving the long rows of loaves into the sleeping in it only once. The rest of my great oven—rhythm, movement, fire belongings I hauled over to the family and quiet Italian talk. I enjoyed the home in Oakland. warmth and the smell, enjoyed watching Usually, I wore a hat pulled down them work, like a dance it was—and low. I sat, relaxed my body, and they always welcomed me. I was a watched, or listened—looked and spectator whose enjoyment in watching listened. I sat in Cassandra’s, in the them heightened their own enjoyment Coffee Gallery, the Bagel Shop, The in the work. Invariably one of them Place—these were the main gathering would thrust a fresh loaf of bread upon spots for people I knew. There was also me when I rose to leave.

SPRING 2017 | 71 Another activity for three to five in through Fisherman’s Wharf to Aquatic the morning was walking through the Park. On the grass of Washington bustling, bright and raucous produce Square, or the sand of Aquatic Park, I’d market located then at easy walking catch some more sleep in the sun, distance from North Beach. My eyes sometimes swim in the bay at Aquatic delighted in the colors of the fruits and Park, eat raw fish at the wharf, or I vegetables, and I felt energy from the would sit and watch, listen, or be surging of the men and their machines, together with friends— “beatniks” we the helter-skelter of it all. Here too, were beginning to be called after people got used to seeing me among Chronicle columnist Herb Caen put them. I was always silent and happy, together Kerouac’s “beat” with the smiling from the delight my eyes were “nik” from the Russian “Sputnik.” beholding. I was joyous watching the Looking and listening were for me beauty of existence. Here in the produce ways of quieting my mind, teaching it to market people called me “wolf-man,” I not think, breaking habits of thought suppose because my hair was long and like: what to do? where to go? But after shaggy, but they always acted toward me awhile, looking and listening became with friendliness and offered me fruit, something much more: I came to see which I ate. and to hear the world, existence, more When I was especially tired, during and more acutely. The more I watched these pre-dawn hours and at other times and listened, the more I saw and heard, also, I went into rhythmical walking, more keenly, more distinctly. sometimes for long distances around Every day I gained more and more San Francisco, long rhythmical strides, pleasure from this listening and looking, arms swinging. The action sort of always seeing and hearing more clearly. turned me on, got me high, rested me. As time went on, I appreciated how Every day, before the sun rose, I glorious and beautiful existence is, climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill living. I saw how busy, preoccupied somewhere alongside of Coit Tower, to were most people with doing, making. sit and meditate. From my spot, all the Existence was already so much to enjoy, sounds of the bay down below me in an so grand and lovely, so exquisite. Just to arc left, right and center rose up directly, see, to hear the sights and sounds that undisturbed by any edifice. I sat, relaxed were there made me happy and deeply, deeply, and listened, watched. delighted. I was truly happy and at The sounds of the ships, of the city, of peace. Everywhere. All the time. the birds were pleasant to me. I enjoyed Throughout those eight months, or a them every day, day after day, for hours year—I’m not sure exactly how many at a time. When I began hearing the months went by—I had not the slightest coarser hum of human voices—tourists inkling of trouble of any kind. The two appeared about nine in the morning to policemen on the beat, when they look out on the bay—I lay down where passed me they said, “Hi Laurie,” and I was and slept for a few hours. I liked that was that. I did what I wanted, when sleeping in the sun. I wanted to, sometimes with others, but When I awoke, I usually went to most often alone. I roamed freely, drank Washington Square Park, or down lots of water, ate enough somehow and

72 | PARABOLA was always serene in enjoyment of the much, did not feel the need for sex, beauty of all I saw unfolding before me, though I enjoyed frequent human day into night, night again into day: the companionship, or at least proximity. warmth of the sun, the cool breezes, the I came to regard my needs as so scant fog, the wind, the sea, sky and stars, that you could say that what you need is trees, flowers, children playing, old what you want. Air, water, rest, exercise, people, young mothers with their a little food, this is all I seemed to need. children, the Chinese, the Italians, the I did have an acute sense of French, the Basque. something like regret or sorrow that My attention became so keen I saw in other people were not enjoying crowded coffee shops and meeting existence as much as I was then. If only places, how people’s bodies reacted to they could sit more quietly and look, each other’s without their consciously listen, feel. I felt that people could live knowing it. better that way and that society would When I sat at a live jazz session, my be better, life would be better that way. hearing was so sharp, it was like what But I didn’t talk. I didn’t think I could poets call “a sensitive ear in the start talking and somehow teach people audience.” I would hear each particular to be that way, change the world. instrument, separately. The musicians When I finally did decide to end this told me that when I listened, they period, I just hoped that somehow, began to hear themselves more some way, I could express what I had distinctly, then each heard the other, experienced and learned and somehow and the music grew in intensity and bring some of it back into existence, at those jam sessions were really least into my own existence, and perhaps something else… at the Cellar, and on for others as well…. . weekends, at the Coffee Gallery. /#,)-0 -/!/% 0*.+.!,/*00)'*/,0*)++/-, It was all a part of that community spirit which existed, the spirit that both allowed me to be on “this trip” and to live freely in the midst of it. The life of North Beach nourished me, fed my spirit and my body. It was fun to be with this happy throng, to share with them the sounds of talk, laughter, music, nature, the clanging of the cable car bell, the sound of the seagulls, Sonny’s saxophone, Max’s bass fiddle, Bill Wiesjon’s piano, Chuck Taylor’s drums. What are the basic needs of man? What did I learn during this time? I lived very contentedly on almost nothing. I required little sleep and little food. I drank water copiously, had abundant sunshine, walked and ran tremendous amounts, meditated, rested

SPRING 2017 | 73 ^ÄçêáÖáå~ä=ïáëÇçã=~åÇ=~Çî~åÅÉÇ=éÜóëáÅë=ãÉÉí=áå íÜÉ=h~êçç=çÑ=pçìíÜ=^ÑêáÅ~ The Dawn’s Heart Star and the Speed of Light

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N PHYSICS THERE IS ONE DEFINING CONSTANT—299,792,458 meters per second. It is the speed of light. I Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), observing the moons of Jupiter, accidentally—because he was attempting to ﬁnd a measure of time that would solve the problem of longitude—set in motion a line of investigation that was resolved by the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer (1644–1710), who established the speed of light sixty-six years later using, as the basis of his calculations, the moons of Jupiter (rightly called Jovian, or Galilean, satellites). What began as an inquiry attempting to solve a problem of navigation (thrown out because deemed impractical for use at sea) has had profound consequences for cosmology.

SPRING 2017 | 75 Most of the universe is not in the stars and galaxies. It’s in what we can’t see.

Light is the most rapid means remarkable is that it requires through which one part of the universe exceptional eyesight to see the can relay an impression, through space, Dawn’s Heart Child (as they call to another. Light thus considered moves Jupiter’s satellites) with naked-eye us into deep time, a measure of which is observation.1 Very few people can the speed of light. There is, however, achieve this; however, it was possible another way of apprehending and for the |xam, assisted by semi-desert measuring time, and this derives from atmospherics, such that the Dawn’s the inconstancy of light. Light changes Heart Star story was pervasive and and shifts in cycles yielding days and persuasive in |xam cosmology. Here is nights; spring, summer, autumn, the |xam story-teller ‖kabbo winter—the seasons; years. The diurnal reporting the Dawn’s Heart Star nature of light generates and animates speaking to his heart, the Dawn’s organic life on earth. By this account, Heart Child. The narrative in its light motivates change and process, entirety fills three-hundred notebook while on the other hand, light speed, as pages and took five months to dictate a constant, is unchanging and eternal, and record. The extract provides a although paradoxically in motion. vivid description of the Galilean Light’s dual nature—constant but satellites orbiting Jupiter, in addition shifting—impinges on us, and we live to being a story about the Dawn’s the contradiction of being in one place Heart Star. at two times; both times in the same You are the Dawn’s Heart Child, a star. I place: one world, two modes of am your father, a star. And so I bury you apprehension, timely and timeless. as a star. You are my heart. I made a child with my heart and so swallow you. BY THE LIGHT OF TWO I walk with you. When you grow I spit COSMOLOGIES you out from my mouth. You go from me and I walk behind. he light that is received from the Galilean satellites informs two MARGINAL BUT MEANINGFUL Tcosmologies; the one, a Western TERRITORY motivated scientiﬁc story, and the other an inspired narrative speciﬁc to the Karoo is a KhoeSan word that |xam-speaking San people who inhabited describes a region in southern Africa. It )%+ *%+$)(*+*"!(**%(! the central is both biome—“the place of great *%(&+) *$+ )%"*$$+ "&)&+' Karoo, a place dryness”—and geological system. )&$") *%( known to them Additionally, it is a landscape saturated as |xam-ka !au with meaning.2 The cosmology and (dust of the knowledge of the |xam San people is |xam). What is recognized as especially valuable and is

76 | PARABOLA included in UNESCO’s Memory of WHAT ARE WE LISTENING FOR? the World-Register for Documentary Heritage.3 adio astronomy took off in the The Karoo does not only have 1940s. The curved lens of an exceptional atmospherics and a R optical telescope captures and unique mythology of global magniﬁes frequencies of visible light. significance, it has exceptional The curved dish antennae of a radio acoustics as well. Elsewhere, there is telescope, in contrast, receive and another location with similar amplify discrete wavelengths—“signals characteristics; the desert region near of invisible radiation”—that are beyond the Murchison Range in Western the visual and auditory range of human Australia, an area inhabited by sight and hearing. Russ Taylor was an Aboriginal people for millennia. A early convert. Since its inception, in the huge telescope is presently under early 1990s, he has been with the SKA construction in both places because of project and is one of the chief architects. the aforesaid reasons. Known as the He explains radio astronomy like this: Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio “We realized in spite of all the astronomy project, this telescope, discoveries and advances in astronomy when completed, will be the world’s that we actually still knew very little biggest telescope anywhere, and will about the universe. The light that we be capable of “seeing” further back in could see with our optical telescopes was time than any other telescope. The in fact a small fraction of what the SKA is a global project supported by universe is made of. The real mysteries twenty-two countries and involving of the nature of the universe are not in 122 international institutions. It is the places we see light, but in the dark the largest terrestrial science regions between the stars and the experiment ever undertaken (space galaxies, the stuff we call dark matter. programs excluded). Most of the universe is not in the stars !*+#(&'%' +*#*& *+&'$)" * ++'(!+&")%+$)+#"(#+)#(&" * and galaxies. It’s in what (!*+!' *$)% +'+(!*+) +)%+*'$*+!*++)% +**&+&) "' we can’t see.” (*$*#'*#+)&*+#"()(* +#' *+*"!(+ +%'&(!*#(+'+(!*+# )$$+)&'' ('%+'+)&%)& '% The intellectual background to the above posits two forces: expansion and collapse, which are bound in dynamic interaction (third force). Matter must collapse from primordial clouds of hydrogen and condense to form stars and planets. “This is a dynamic struggle,” Taylor says, “between the gravitational force of collapse and forces that

SPRING 2017 | 77 oppose collapse; swirling motions, '%()*+'+ "(*&+)% +(!*+)$"$*)%+#)(*$$"(*# explosions and magnetic fields. The '+ &')+)% * *+)% +)$$"#('+)$$+ !'('&)!* ++ most puzzling of mysteries is that 96% of what makes up the universe is an ‘essence,’ which is the dark matter, revealed by the effect of its gravity on the visible universe. Most of it is a form of pure energy spread throughout the universe. This ‘dark energy’ is the real fabric of space and time. Its properties are unknown, but they determine the ultimate fate of the universe.” The SKA objectives are ambitious. Discoveries in radio astronomy have earned Nobel Prizes. Twice in my presence Taylor has said that further Nobel Prizes will be awarded when the data from the SKA becomes available orientation in the universe is liable to and when scientists and astronomers shift as a result. subject that data to analysis. “The answer to our biggest science questions AN INVARIANT UNIVERSE will be in this data: life, the universe and everything.” The SKA will be the largest data producer in the world when fully pon scrutiny, Galileo’s vision operational. Equally huge amounts of reveals his striving, which aims money are being invested in developing Ufor meaning that is objective, new technologies and computing pure, and abstract. systems in order to process big data. Philosophy is written in this grand book, The Inter-University Institute for Data the universe, which stands continually Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) was open to our gaze, but the book cannot be launched in September 2015, and will understood unless one first learns to oversee this important aspect of the comprehend the language and read the project. Teams, institutions, and letters in which it is composed. It is networks of people will be involved. The written in a language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and narrative that tells the story of the other geometric figures without which it cosmos will in future not have an is humanly impossible to understand a individual author or a singular voice. If single word of it; without these, one there are Nobel Prizes in the offing, wanders about in a dark labyrinth.4 these will be awarded to multiple collaborators, not individuals. In this In pursuit of invariance and perfect respect the SKA will advance new forms, Galileo’s vision cannot but find methods of doing science, which will distracting and problematic variability surpass conventional systems of and change. In the extreme there is no knowledge production. Cosmology, as place for process, paradox, and we know it, is bound to change and our contradiction. Meaning resides in

78 | PARABOLA absolutes and pure forms (Plato’s eidos) PSYCHOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY that have an exclusively timeless derivation. Galileo’s conception of the he dualism of Descartes, and its universe finds its apogee in Descartes’ residual residence in science and dualism, which by any measure is harsh, Ttechnology, should be viewed since it places thought outside the with necessary caution. Ambivalence, physical realm. In their cognitive even skepticism, are not abnormal but framing of the world, Descartes, and rather a healthy response. Assertions of Galileo before him, are light-years away scientific and technological “progress” from the Dawn’s Heart Star. Animals become problematic, if ultimately they are denied consciousness, for example, prove divisive and destructive. Such is and are deemed to be without reason the dilemma expressed by Michael (Cogito ergo sum), and thus are Collins at a significant moment in relegated to the category of automata. Western technological development: Progress in science and technology Apollo 11 awaits take off for the journey through the seventeenth and to the moon. Three American astronauts eighteenth centuries advanced the are ready to embark on perhaps the hegemony of a philosophy of greatest technological achievement in objectification and strengthened history. The date is July 16th, 1969. mechanistic understanding. As a Michael Collins, the command pilot, conception of the universe it stands in gazes down at the early morning Florida contrast to sensate perceptivity and landscape. These are his impressions: lived-body experience. In this latter On my left is an unimpeded view of the formulation, intellect is not alien to beach below, unmarred by human totems; physicality but rather physicality and a on my right are the most colossal piles of listening body play upon intelligence machinery ever assembled. If I cover my and vice versa. As a way of being in the right eye, I see the Florida of Ponce de world it is productive of a relational Leon, and beyond it the sea which is ontology that emphasizes sentience and mother to us all. I am the original man. If I cover my left eye, I see civilization and interdependence. Animals are viewed as technology and the United States of people in mythological-time-space, for America and a frightening array of wires example, which in turn has and metal. I am but one adolescent in an ramifications for everyday practice. In army which has received its marching numerous ways there is brutality in orders.5 mechanistic leanings and the application of dualistic principals. Collins describes an incapacity to Judged by this rationale “certain” integrate two powerful and contrary people, in a misconceived idea of impressions. Why this self-reflection and evolution (social Darwinism), were return to origins before assertion and considered animals and thus less than setting forth? Confronted by the people. Time and again this thinking colossus of technology and justified the extermination of First militarization, why does original man People. Psychologically, this mental suddenly appear? Surely, it is because blindness, disassociation, and denial First People—original man and comes back to haunt us. woman—are embedded in the psyche

SPRING 2017 | 79 Confronted by the colossus of technology and militarization, why does original man suddenly appear?

and cannot be suppressed. Time and My mother was the one who told me that the girl arose; she put her hands into the again, First People have been wood ashes; she threw up the wood ashes physically and emotionally suppressed into the sky. She said to the wood ashes: and oppressed. Can the Dawn’s Heart “The wood ashes which are here, they Star co-exist with the speed of light, must altogether become the Milky Way. as was earlier insinuated? They must white lie along the sky, that Conceptually yes, but in practice the the stars may stand outside the Milky prognosis is not good, given the facts Way, while the Milky Way is the Milky 7 of history. With the best of intentions Way, while it used to be wood ashes”. no amount of publicity and posturing This is a story of metamorphosis. In will rectify the situation; much more it humans play a part in the is required.6 Psychological well-being transformational processes required for and individuation requires meaningful the formation and maintenance of the integration of polarities (third force cosmos. The universe that is portrayed again), otherwise left and right is not simply created from above but is remain divided. The universe depends elevated from below as well. Human on our search, with conscience, in the participation is required as a dark places for the sake of our souls fundamental principal of co-creation. and that of the cosmos. Invariably The en-framing structure of the story is quarrels arise in consequence of that the ash, which becomes the Milky cultural incompatibilities but there is Way, was formerly the roots of the equally a deep unifying and universal !huin plant. The !huin roots, young hope and healing in the concept of and old, are nutritional and co-creation. Nested within co- symbolically significant, plus they have creation is understanding, which an aesthetic purpose, imparting color suggests that interdependency is the to the stars. The roots, once growing in fabric of existence, the acceptance of the earth, are returned to the sky. The which requires responsibility and care. earth’s things and the sky’s things are The documentary record of co- cultivated through mutuality and creative existence is fragmentary. It is reciprocal exchanged. The fire burns a knowledge system not highly valued the roots, and then the ash, which in techno-industrial society and is becomes the Milky Way, lights the sky. thus relegated to the margins. Where Light and energy are not static but it survives, it does so precariously in transforming and transformational. the practices and wisdom traditions of marginalized people, mostly. The INSATIABLE CURIOSITY |xam story of the creation of the Milky Way gives an example of what MeerKAT, which represents one co-creation was, and might be. percent of the SKA, will be completed

80 | PARABOLA in 2017. The next nine percent of the and especially to consider the processes SKA will be finished around 2023 or of co-creation. A cognitive shift with 2024. With ten percent of the wide-spread acceptance is critical at telescope operational there certainly this moment in time for the sake of will be startling revelations. The final this planet; mother to us all.9 The SKA ninety percent of SKA will be is also an apt metaphor for search in functional by 2030, “capable of general, given its operational methods: answering questions about the universe focusing on the dark regions, that we have not even asked yet.” purposefully seeking to understand the Humans have a natural curiosity, essence of the cosmos, reaching us via which would be perfectly innocent if signals of invisible radiation. it were not insatiable. Betrayal can happen most insidiously at the level 1 ǁkabbo pointed out the Dawn’s Heart Star and of identification with preferential the astronomer George Maclear identiﬁed the Dawn’s Heart Star as Jupiter. There is convincing meanings, including the myth of evidence that at least two of the Galilean satellites meaning itself. Plus, there is the were visible to the |xam, aided by the ideal atmos- automatic penchant for meaning- pheric conditions and by exceptional eye-sight making, and an inability to turn (Koorts, W. P. (2007). The nature of the Dawn’s Heart Star. AFRICAN SKIES/CIEUX AFRICAINS 11 (July): away from the self-created self. 54-56. Final injustice resides in a blind 2 The Digital Bleek and Lloyd Archive http://lloy- conceptual slant that is neglectful of dbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/. co-creation. Knowledge is doomed if 3 UNESCO it cannot understand that knowledge http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-world/reg- alone is recursive, or worse, harbors ister/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered- the seed of its own destruction, if heritage-page-8/the-bleek-collection/. taken to extreme. 4 Galileo Galilei, IL SAGGIATORE, 1653 In the |xam world the known and 5 Collins, M. 1974. CARRYING THE FIRE. pp. 359. the unknown were no doubt accepted Italics added 6 See, http://www.conservation- as given, and death was inevitable.8 watch.org/2016/09/09/planet-at-the-cross- Nature provided but it was not a roads-where-are-indigenous-peoples-in-iucns-con- Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, the gress-theme/ , accessed 4 October, 2016. Also, world was meaningful because a Solastalgia: distress caused by environmental change relational, co-creative way of being in https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/solastalgia-dis- the world provides assurances, fed by tress-caused-environmental-change-neil- influences coming from beyond rusch?trk=mp-author-card, accessed 18 October, meaning per se. Individuals 2016. 7 Bleek W. & Lloyd L. 1911. SPECIMENS OF BUSHMAN participated directly in a universal FOLKLORE. pp. 73. living order, ultimately unfathomable, 8 Rusch N. 2010. “My Heart Stands in the Hill” in which the psyche and cosmos are Parabola (Life after Death) Vol. 35(2), pp. 14–21. not separate but rather, profoundly 9 The carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmos- integrated, in ways not always obvious phere crossed a critical threshold of 400ppm in the latter months of 2016. What this means we don’t or easy to assess. know, ultimately. What we do know is that it is With the advent of the SKA there is dangerous, and likely irreversible. http://www.sci- encealert.com/earth-s-co2-levels-just-perma- an opportunity to pause and reflect nently-crossed-a-really-scary-threshold, accessed upon aboriginal nature, once again, 28 September, 2016.

SPRING 2017 | 81 Life Review and the Search for Meaning

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A doula is a trained professional who assists a woman, as well as her spouse and family, before, during, and after childbirth. In the passages below, the author, founder of the ﬁrst End of Life Doula Program in the U.S., applies the doula principle to the act of dying and an accompanying search for meaning. –The Editors

UESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF ONE’S LIFE arise quite naturally as a person approaches death. The questions center on how well a person Qfeels they have lived, the things they have accomplished, how happy they were, and the impact they had on others. These questions often arrive in the middle of the night when the dying person can’t sleep or in those moments when activities around them don’t hold their attention. Usually, these questions do not result in a careful examination of events, because people do not appreciate the benefit of doing that. Instead, they surface and disappear in fleeting moments, like silvery fish jumping above the surface of a stream and falling back in. Only when a person explores these questions in a serious and concerted way will they resolve the basic conflict that Erik Erikson delineated between ego integrity and despair….A dying person can either ignore that developmental challenge or face it head on. The doula approach advocates for engagement, because we have seen that successfully resolving this challenge helps a dying person achieve wisdom and peace at the end of life.

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ife review is the primary tool a are right there and need to be worked doula uses to guide the dying on immediately. This happened during Lperson in exploring questions of my first visit with Richard, a man in his meaning. One of the main theoreticians late sixties who was dying from on life review was Dr. Robert Butler, pancreatic cancer. who wrote about the need to process experiences from the past so that a ichard’s wife led me across a person can reintegrate them in a positive marble floor to an unexpectedly way. Research prompted by Butler’s R small living room crammed work demonstrated that life review can with furniture, vases, sculptures, and reduce depression, increase life paintings that covered nearly every satisfaction, and promote greater square inch of the walls from floor to acceptance of self—results that support ceiling. The effect was claustrophobic healthy ego integrity. and dizzying, as if the room could In my work with dying people, I have suddenly start spinning on its own axis. found that the most powerful and Richard was huddled into one corner of insistent memories tend to revolve a couch covered in a wild print fabric. As around unresolved conflicts, guilt, we went through the introductions, he regret, and blame. It is easier to explore handed me a framed picture of himself those kinds of memories after standing confidently on a ski slope establishing a relationship of trust with a somewhere. He was solid looking and dying person. Sometimes, however, even large framed but not heavy. in an initial visit, the painful memories

84 | PARABOLA I wondered if worsening pain was contributing to the urgency he felt to talk about the negatives in his life—a sense that time was running out.

“That was me before I got sick,” he So here we were, entering the zone of said. “I hardly recognize myself now life review work at Richard’s initiative. when I look in the mirror.” The man When this happens as organically as it sitting on the couch looked half the size did with Richard, the doula will allow of the man in the photograph. the person to control the direction of “You look like you belonged on the the conversation, because it comes from slopes,” I said. an urgency inside them. “I was an excellent skier. Every winter “It sounds like you’re thinking about I would go to Europe at some point to the negative things that happened in ski in the Alps. It was one of the ways I your life; things you wish you could indulged myself,” he said, his voice change. Is that right?” heavy with nostalgia. “Now, I can hardly “Yea, it’s all the places I messed move off this couch to get to the up. Maybe I’m thinking that way bathroom. One of the few pleasures I because I’m staring into the face of have left is watching the leaves on the death. You can see it in my body; it’s Japanese maple out there [he pointed to getting closer.” the one window in the room] as they “Would you like to talk about some dance in the wind. They look like they of that now?” I asked, still not sure if he belong on a bird rather than a tree.” was ready to do life review work. I I was sitting on a chair in front of the wanted him to decide. couch. I didn’t say anything, waiting to He seemed to grow smaller as he sat see if he would speak again. I could feel there, gazing once again out the a pensive sadness in the slow way he window. I knew better than to interrupt spoke. It was clear that there was the inner calculation that would lead to something on his mind that was larger whatever he needed to say next. As I than the decline in his body. As I waited, I saw signs of physical pain play discussed in chapter 5, during active across Richard’s face. He rubbed the listening, a doula will allow silence, right side of his abdomen below the especially in moments that seem ribs. I chose not to ask him about the charged—like this one did. pain just then, because I didn’t want to “I’ve been thinking about so many divert him from his internal process. But things in the last several days,” Richard I wondered if worsening pain was said. “Failures from the past and regrets contributing to the urgency he felt to haunting me. How can I come to terms talk about the negatives in his life—a with that at this point? It feels sense that time was running out. overwhelming.” When Richard did talk again, he started to tell me the story of his first

SPRING 2017 | 85 marriage. He had been in his mid- to contain more of those, so I usually twenties. He said that his wife start my life review there, asking periodically experienced deep questions that are pointed toward the depression, which dragged him main activities of life: work, down into dark moods he had never relationships, socializing, involvement experienced before. At some point, with spirituality, and time spent alone. they had started fighting a lot. He The questions should be open-ended, realized after a few years of this that such as: “Tell me about your work.” he didn’t love her anymore, but he “How did spirituality or religion play a couldn’t bring himself to end the part in your life?” “What felt satisfying relationship. The crucial decision or disappointing about the work you points in life, those times when a did?” One of the broader questions I person chooses one direction or like to ask, because it often uncovers another, and the reasons they make unfinished business or unresolved those choices, reveal a great deal. conflicts, is: “What difficulties did you They can become the focal points encounter in your middle years?” in exploring meaning, and later, in Without me needing to ask the expressing that meaning in a question, Richard had led us directly legacy project. into a conversation on probably the Choices lead to outcomes that may biggest difficulty in his life. A difficulty be positive, negative, or a combination that, when he looked back on it now, of the two. When a person does life involved a series of bad choices and review work, they need to explore painful outcomes. It took us a couple of choices, events, and outcomes. visits to fully explore those choices and Discussion about negative outcomes or outcomes. They involved having a child events will reveal some of the work a against his better judgment and staying person might do to resolve conflicts that in the marriage too long. stand in the way of turning toward “When I finally left,” Richard told integrity and away from despair. Talking me during our second visit, “my wife about the positive outcomes or events turned bitter and nasty. I was the sole will reinforce integrity and may lead to support for them. I tried to stay possible legacy projects. Looking at involved in our daughter Jennifer’s life, both leads to uncovering meaning. but my wife made that more and more As it turned out, it was the choices in difficult. By the time she was in her his first marriage and their outcomes mid-teens, I saw Jennifer only that caused Richard the greatest pain in sporadically, and she made it clear she his life. His second marriage, which had didn’t care if I visited.” produced two daughters who were very “That must have been very close to him, had brought him only joy. painful,” I said. When a person does life review work, “It broke my heart. But by then I was it helps if they cover all the periods of remarried and had young children who their life to discover the seminal loved having me around. At one point, experiences that drive their overall sense due to circumstances and the demands of success or failure. Typically, I find of my successful business, I didn’t see that the middle years of adulthood tend Jennifer for six months. When I thought

86 | PARABOLA #!! $#%%!#"%$$ ! about calling her, it just felt too hard, so over ﬁfteen years. This is the big failure I didn’t. I only heard from Jennifer in my life. It haunts me now as my death once, about ﬁve years later. It was a very gets closer.” angry phone call. She accused me of At this point Richard looked straight abandoning her and blamed me for at me, and I could see the suffering in everything that was wrong in her life. his eyes. When someone is in such Now I haven’t seen or spoken to her in despair, it doesn’t help to try to

SPRING 2017 | 87 Even though he kept moving toward his death, he was more alive inside.

immediately change the feelings, to find “Maybe trying to get in touch directly some way to soften them or push them isn’t what you need to do. Other people aside, like hosing dead leaves off the I have worked with who had to deal walkway to your house. I knew there with a broken relationship found that was much in his life to be proud of. But writing a letter to the person was very often when a person approaches death, helpful. Something about the familiar it is the failures or the regrets that speak format of a letter makes it feel like most insistently in the mind. you actually communicated, even if “I think about Jennifer all the time, the letter never gets sent or the like a tune you can’t stop hearing,” he person never sees it. I know people said. “And the thoughts seem to get who wrote to a parent or sibling who louder and more insistent. I try to were no longer alive, and still it felt think about the good things in my like they had communicated. It may life, but the guilt and self-blame let you unburden yourself more.” won’t let go of me.” This was the beginning of a process “It sounds like trying to replace your that moved Richard out of the despair troubling thoughts with more positive he was stuck in to working toward a ones isn’t working. Have you thought resolution— or at least toward easing about other ways to deal with this?” his pain. “I have thought about trying to get After writing the letter and rewriting in touch with her. But even if I could it a couple of times, he decided to find her, I’m terrified that she wouldn’t actually try to get it to Jennifer. One of want anything to do with me. That his other daughters, Lisa, searched the would be so devastating at this point. Internet and found Jennifer’s address. How could I carry that into my death?” So Richard sent the letter. Up to this point in our work As we waited to see if she would together, my role as the doula was to respond, Richard agreed to try a help Richard explore the issue that was visualization to release some of his plaguing him and allow solutions to guilt. I had him imagine that his guilt come from inside his struggle. Now I and shame were dark clouds that had felt the time was right for me to make a gathered inside his chest, surrounding direct suggestion that might help him his heart. He could see the edges of his move in a direction he had considered heart turning grey. Then, in his but was afraid to try. imagination, I came to him and “Of course you don’t know what handed him a jar with magic salve could happen. But you are certainly inside. I instructed him to rub it on his suffering a great deal now. Taking some chest above his heart and watch as it other action might at least let you stop turned into an opalescent light that beating up on yourself so much.” I penetrated his skin and turned the dark placed my hand on his arm, so he could clouds to ones that were white and feel my support at a physical level. healing. He could see his heart turning

88 | PARABOLA a vibrant, glowing red and feel it filled caused her such pain. The visit didn’t with love for those around him, for resolve the feelings, but Jennifer kept Jennifer, and for himself. visiting. During the last four months I guided Richard in this of his life, Richard was able to bring a visualization many times over the next degree of healing to his once broken three weeks. We also continued to do relationship with Jennifer. I don’t the life review work. Now that he had know how the relationship might taken action on his unfinished have developed if they’d had more business regarding Jennifer, he was time with each other, but at least more available to explore other there was a relationship. aspects of his life. If there are The life review work with Richard powerful negative issues moved into new territory. He had overwhelming a person, it is difficult come to an accommodation with the to have them explore the more broken part of his past, which allowed positive parts of their life experience. us to talk about the things he was Once the negative issues are proud of, his most satisfying addressed in some way (and just experiences, and his love of snow and listening deeply may be enough), it the mountains. The shift in his becomes easier to turn from despair emotional state was dramatic. Even toward integrity. Then, discussing though he kept moving toward his successes, accomplishments, and death, he was more alive inside. joyous events will accelerate the He made a video legacy in which he movement toward integrity. spoke about the values he had tried to When Richard finally received a live, the things he had come to believe letter from Jennifer, she said she would were most important in life, what he come to see him the following week. had learned—even through his The visit was very awkward and mistakes and failures. He told uncomfortable for everyone. The everyone, Jennifer included, how conversation skirted the real issues much he loved them and what he between Richard and Jennifer. hoped for them after he was gone. Through the tightness in the way The video was only about thirty Jennifer spoke, they could feel the minutes long, but it summed up his anger inside her. As a result, the visit life in a powerful way. When I watched felt stilted and unsatisfying. Lisa walked the video, Richard looked larger to me Jennifer to the door and asked her to than the shrunken man I had met at please come back. She told Jennifer my first visit—more like the image of that many times in the last few months, him on the ski slope in the picture he Richard had expressed his great sorrow had showed me. In the end, in spite of over what had happened; that he the great pain he had to deal with, he desperately wanted to somehow make died very peacefully. it different before he died. Jennifer did come back a couple of Adapted, and reprinted with permission from Conari Press an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, weeks later and finally expressed her CARING FOR THE DYING by Henry Fersko-Weiss is anger and hurt. Richard took it all in available wherever books and ebooks are sold or directly from the publisher at www.redwheel- and told her how sorry he was to have weiser.com or 800-423-7087.

SPRING 2017 | 89

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Impersonal Kindness

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Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch (1900-1958) studied with G.I Gurdjieff (1866-1949) for decades. The following passage details experiences during the late 1940s in Paris. –The Editors

R. GURDJIEFF WOULD NOT ALLOW ANYONE TO SAY that he acted from kindness, yet it seemed obvious to us that he did. I Mfrequently asked myself what the motives were behind his often unexpected actions. Did they originate from kindness, sympathy, or was there some other inner imperative? Certainly, his motive was not kindness in the usual sentimental sense of the word. This was especially true in relation to his pupils. No, if it was kindness, it was a real kindness and outlook on everything that could only be described as something called love. It was not a personal feeling for another, but rather one that came from somewhere else. And this included his relations with his pupils. In other words, it was an opening to a sense of the sacred that he shared with others. This was quite distinct from his legendary generosity, his kindness in the ordinary sense of the term, of which we caught comical and unforgettable glimpses nearly every day.

SPRING 2017 | 91 His table was a veritable cornucopia, for no day passed without parcels of food arriving from all over the world.... Yet, if there was no one to eat with, he would often choose not to eat at all.

Since I was often with him at Here was an old woman who came different times of the day, I saw in an for herself and also for her husband, intimate way aspects of his life that most who could no longer walk; there, an of his pupils, who only attended the undernourished and sick man who said evening groups, never knew about. I he was unable to work; then children have often spoken of his kindness from a large poverty-stricken family; and toward me, but now I want to recall the concierge from a neighboring some events that I chanced to witness. building, who had looked after a Mr. Gurdjieff often did his own bedridden tenant on the seventh floor shopping when he took his morning for a long time. stroll. As soon as he returned, he started Now, an old, aristocratic Russian lady working in the kitchen. During this appears. She respectfully greets Mr. time, he would not receive any of his Gurdjieff. He takes her bowl while pupils, and the door opening onto the asking for details of her husband’s main staircase remained closed. health. Instead of answering directly, she It was quite another story, however, starts to put on airs, to grovel, and to at the back staircase. One had to see it flatter Mr. Gurdjieff, who still does not to believe it: from the bottom of the know what food would be appropriate. stairs to the top, there was a long He interrupts her and asks the same procession of beggars, parasites, and question again, this time more dryly. the like. One had his bowl, another his The lady finally answers, but while Mr. tin plate, still another an old pot, all Gurdjieff serves her, she repeats her coming solemnly to receive a full ration mundane compliments. I am of soup accompanied by some kind embarrassed for her and make a move in words. Mr. Gurdjieff himself served her direction, wishing to make her from enormous cooking pots while understand that she is on dangerous asking after the health of everyone, not ground. But, carried away by her forgetting those who could not come groveling, she is totally unaware and because of illness. When he found out goes on to compare the kindness of Mr. that someone was sick, he would say, Gurdjieff with that supreme…. I do not “Well, let’s give him something learn which paragon of virtue she meant special!” and, according to the latest because he interrupts her in mid- information he received about him, he sentence. “You, your husband, and all would fill the container with some dish your kind have made your path in life or other that he had prepared. by playing the role of ass-lickers, and in

92 | PARABOLA spite of so many years in exile, you are unreserved partiality on my part. If so, still not free from that repugnant trait. please excuse a devotion that may seem It is truly sad!” excessive. One has to imagine how living The woman begins to justify and near him shattered all habitual forms: excuse herself. Mr. Gurdjieff says to her, one found oneself literally entering into “Good, good, I know, it’s not your the world of myth. We all experienced fault. Now be off with you; we still have this same feeling. much to do.” After Mr. Gurdjieff’s death, I The woman, offended, goes toward witnessed many touching scenes. For the door, but Mr. Gurdjieff reassures example, an old woman came to the her in a warm voice, simply saying, apartment about three weeks later. “Till tomorrow.” Overcome by the news that he was no This scene was repeated every longer there, she could only say, “And morning, the procession usually ending now, how shall I pay my rent?” around one o’clock, sometimes only to Someone else came and said, “I would start again in the evening. Mr. Gurdjieff so much liked to have thanked him. He also prepared enormous quantities of paid for my daughter’s treatment, and food to share with his pupils and others she has just come out of the sanatorium, who regularly frequented his apartment. cured.” After hearing of Mr. Gurdjieff’s His table was a veritable cornucopia, for death, one man collapsed into an no day passed without parcels of food armchair, remained silent for ten arriving from all over the world: the minutes, and then murmured, “To south of France, Spain, Turkey, come from South Africa and learn this. Australia, the Americas, and even Africa. How sad.” And he left. Yet, if there was no one to eat with, he And I thought to myself, “Yes, how would often choose not to eat at all. sad, how sad not to have known him; As for the children, Mr. Gurdjieff but more, how sad to have known him never left home without filling his and not to have understood him. And pockets with a good supply of bonbons above all, how sad to have understood and various sweets. When he came him and not to have served his work.” across a mother with her child, he Reprinted by permission from Tcheslaw always offered a bonbon to the little Tchekhovitch’s GURDJEFF: A MASTER IN LIFE (Dolmen one. If the child offered it to his Meadows Editions, 2006). mother, he gave him two more. But if the child did not offer anything, that was all he received. If the mother hid the sweet to give to the child later, she was offered more too. In the district where he took his regular walk, he was well known to all the children and those who accompanied them. He was a kind of Father Christmas, and was called “Monsieur Bonbon.” The reader may be irritated by what appears to be a blind attachment and

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Towards a Christian Tantra g~ãÉë=eìÖÜÉë=oÉÜç

Tantra is the hot blood of spiritual practice. It smashes the taboo against unreasonable happiness; a thunderbolt path, swift, joyful, and ﬁerce. —Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

And I say: can [those], who have in [their] hearts the Divine Fire of the Holy Spirit burning naked, not be set on fire, not shine and glitter and not take on the radiance of the Deity in the degree of [their] purification and penetration by fire? —St. Simeon the New Theologian

Set as jewels within the fairy chimney rock formations of the high desert of central Turkey, historic hermit caves dot the mountainsides of Göreme, Cappadocia. I came to these caves nursing a recent disappointment. Only a week before I had been in Istanbul (ancient Constantinople) and had gone to the great Hagia Sophia church there. This church, largely unknown to Western Christians, was the central church of Christendom for over a thousand years and serves still today as the model for nearly every mosque built around the world. Hagia Sophia had been “the holy of holies” of the Christian world, long before St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome took central stage in the West. Hagia Sophia had been the church of Byzantine emperors and ecumenical patriarchs. Its mosaics are rightly among the most famous and recognizable works of art in the Christian world.

SPRING 2017 | 95 For years I had dreamed about the day 0#,01 +"-,0%1-++#.0"-1$ 1( ./0)10-.0 I might visit the Hagia Sophia. In my fantasy I had imagined walking into this great and beautiful sacred space and being struck with awe, being overtaken by the living presence of God, never to be the same again. I can still remember my expectation, the openness of my heart and spirit, as I entered this great mother of churches through the patriarchal door. My eyes were wide with wonder, and I felt my heart quicken. I crossed the threshold and breathed in the fragrance of the place. And nothing happened. The stirring beauty of the mosaics, the imposing grandeur and opulence of the space, the dizzying domes and cacophony of ancient items, like the pre-Christian baptismal font taken from a healing center dedicated to the god Asclepius, were all as I had hoped, even more so— and yet that burning presence I sought, companions and I were brought by our which in my imagination lived guide (it was mandatory to have an particularly here, eluded me. official guide) to one of the refectories, or A week later, warm in the dry heat dining rooms, of these early monastics. and bright sun of the Anatolian high The dining room in its entirety consisted desert, I was climbing into the small caves of two parallel troughs of about twenty inhabited by early Christian ascetics in feet in length and three feet in depth; it Göreme. Some of these caves were barely was a study in minimalism. The ascetics large enough to lie down or walk around would sit on the ground, their lower legs in. Others could fit a small gathering. in the trough as if they were on a chair, They served as home, chapel, and study for with the ground between the troughs the early hermits and mystics who spent serving as their dining table. their lives here seeking union with God I was gripped with an urge to sit there, through spiritual practices, silence, and to take a seat at this table where so many devotion. The fragrance of these spiritual spiritual seekers had taken their scarce seekers still lingered on the cave walls and amounts of food before returning to their in the desert air. The dry climate of holy work of solitude. Our guide was clear Cappadocia has preserved the crude holy that we were to look but not touch. Being icons and textual fragments they had a bit of a scofflaw, I lingered toward the chalked on the walls of their hollowed-out back of our group as the guide began to cells over a thousand years ago, making move on, waiting for him and my ten each cave a unique devotional space travel companions to round a bend. Then created through the synergy of nature and I walked straight for the refectory and sat monk. Toward the end of the day, my on the ground with my legs in the trough

96 | PARABOLA and elbows on the table, as countless others followers appropriated the titles of had done before me. Roman power used to describe Immediately, I experienced what felt Augustus Caesar, such as “Son of God” like a lightning bolt coming from the and “Savior” and even “Virgin-born,” ground beneath my seat and moving up to express a very different picture of through my body with speed and power. power antithetical to Rome and her With this lightning came a revelation, Caesars. In the long run, this which I heard from somewhere like the pit antilanguage was only somewhat of my guts or the center of the earth: The successful. Over time, the paradox and people at the Hagia Sophia are not your protest that informed the early Christian ancestors. These people are your ancestors. use of Neoplatonic and imperial Roman I began to shake and felt like I was language was largely lost. Christian strangely overheating. Sweat poured out spirituality fell prey to the world- from every pore, and I think I blacked out denying and body-negative views of the for a while. I don’t remember rising from ascetic Neoplatonists, just as Christ my seat. It took me quite a while before I himself became more and more fused tried to share what had happened to me, with the imperial Roman god Sol since at the time I had no idea what this Invictus (the Unconquerable Sun). message meant. The mystical Christianity that I tasted among its own artifacts at Göreme had hese people are your ancestors. thrived largely outside the official There exists another lineage, institution symbolized by large Tanother stream that was structures such as the Hagia Sophia. outside, or maybe underneath, the This lineage is not rooted in imperial power and grandeur that had been the power or Sol Invictus. It is rooted in a Hagia Sophia in its prime. Tracing this way of seeing that parallels the insights stream, we find it leads us back to the of Eastern Tantra, though from within a original wellspring of Jesus and the Christian framework. early communities that gathered around his presence, before and after THE REST BETWEEN TWO NOTES his death. At certain points in history, this stream has been a roaring river, bringing life and refreshment to many; s I began a more focused at other times, it has been an exploration of the meaning of underground aquifer, all but invisible. A what had happened to me at Writers of the first centuries of the the Göreme refectory, I quickly ran Common Era who swam in and drank into a problem. It became clear that from this stream used the thought- much classical Christian language that language of their time to relate their might have been used to speak about experience. They redefined the terms of the deep revelations of the mystical Neoplatonic philosophy in an attempt to tradition had been drastically express a reality that was in many redefined or had become loaded with important ways contrary to the views of dogmatic baggage and strange Neoplatonic mysticism.1 In the same associations from more modern way, the initial generations of Jesus’ expressions of the faith such as

SPRING 2017 | 97 We can experience the Divine, but we cannot fully circumscribe the Divine with names, deﬁnitions, or categories.

evangelicalism or biblical childhood, and formed the center of fundamentalism. In searching for a my university studies. vocabulary to express the unique and Now it seemed that I was being often surprising insights of this mystical called to inhabit both worlds, to allow Christianity, I found that the traditional Tantra and mystical Christianity to religious language of the Christian coexist in my heart. Bearing authentic household was, paradoxically, not witness to what was coming alive within always the best choice. I began to me, I sought for the clearest and most explore other vocabularies. useful way of expressing the truths of During this same period of mystical Christianity within our own searching, I had a series of powerful historical particularity. This work drew visions (some recounted in this book) me into an exploration of the resonances that included both Christian and and parallels between Tantra and Hindu imagery. These visions brought Christianity. Two lines that are parallel up new questions for me. For instance, travel in the same direction but never what did it mean for me as a Christian overlap: each remains its own reality. Yet person to have a vision that included honoring the space between them makes both Jesus and the goddess Durga, and their resonances all the more led me to an experience of the Divine informative. There is a pregnant silence that seemed to move beyond the between the unique notes (languages) of parameters of either? I meditated upon Tantra and Christianity. It is that silence these visions and discussed them with between the two notes that makes them my own spiritual mentors, who both into music, and holds the promise of a affirmed that such experiences could deeper sounding. As the poet Rainer be part of a genuine Christian path and Maria Rilke has written, helped me come to realize that the I am the rest between two notes, substance of these visions would be Which, struck together, sound discordantly, significantly flattened if limited to only Because death’s note would claim a higher one tradition’s iconography. Our key. pluralistic world allows for the But in the dark pause, trembling, the notes interplay of such images in ways that meet, harmonious. 2 are still faithful to one’s root tradition, And the song continues sweet. just as in its early days Christianity Many Christians in the past, limited engaged the art and deities of older by their cultural isolation or lack of traditions in fruitful ways. In my own mutual sharing with other faiths, may case, the insights and images of the have had a cultural or tribal reaction Eastern world, particularly of Indian against difference and understood their and Tibetan Tantra, had been very faith in an exclusionary way. Today, deep alive for me from the time of my interspiritual sharing made possible

98 | PARABOLA %10(0$*)01 '-&1'%1

through modern pluralistic describe an elephant. One, grasping a environments leads many of us to see leg of the elephant, says, “It is like a that all these traditions can be other, pillar.” Another, holding its tail, legitimate faces of the Divine Mystery affirms an elephant is like a rope. A that carry learnings for us all. Each third man, running his hands along the religious tradition offers a particular elephant’s trunk, says it is like a tree culturally conditioned picture of our branch. The fourth man, stroking the relationship with the Divine. The Divine ear of the elephant, says it is like a reality, transcategorical in itself, can only hand fan. The fifth feels the belly of be perceived through categories: that is, the elephant and believes it is like a through our own historical, cultural, wall, while the last man, holding the embodied particularity. And one tusk, claims an elephant is like a solid distinctive particularity can be fructiﬁed pipe. After some confusion, a king by engaging another, especially in a explains to the blind men that each, in culturally complex world. fact, is right, though none of their Stories and fables that are of universal accounts is complete. It would not be appeal tend to cross into many different possible for any single one of them to cultures. The story of the blind men and fully describe an elephant; each, the elephant is one such story, and it is however, could assert something true found in various Asian and European and meaningful from the position of forms. In a Jain version of this fable, six his own engagement with the elephant blind men are asked to encounter and through his distinctive particularity.

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It is through the particular, the consumed (Exodus3). When Moses asks conditioned, the finite, that truth can be God for God’s name, God responds, “I known; and it is because of the nature of am who I am” (or, “I will be who I will this knowing as conditioned and finite be”). In this cryptic response, God and arising within a given context that offers Moses something beyond a this knowing cannot be total. According definition. God lets Moses into the very to Jain thought, an object of heart of God, which exceeds all knowledge has an infinite number of categories and names. So we can facets (Sanskrit: anekantatmaka) and experience the Divine, but we cannot what we come to know is partial, not fully circumscribe the Divine with complete. Complete knowledge, names, definitions, or categories. according to the Jain theory of partial As a modern parallel, John Hick, a predication (syadvada), would only be modern philosopher of religion, asserts possible in the hypothetical situation in that our absolute truth claims about which every singular viewpoint is God are in fact absolute claims about considered on an absolutely equal our perceptions of God; our religious footing with every other. knowledge is culturally and historically Resonating with this sense of the conditioned. Such conditioned paths Divine as beyond full knowability is the provide various ways to genuinely story from the Hebrew scriptures in experience the Divine, yet also prevent which Moses encounters the presence of our reflection on this experience from God in a bush that burns but is not ever being objectively definitive; that is,

100 | PARABOLA We can enhance our perceptions through hearing the perceptions of others, shared in open and respectful dialogue.

the Divine is never fully knowable. As life-giving ways that are still faithful to we can only approach the Divine its particular genius. through our distinctive cultural and It is in this context that we will lift up religious particulars,3 no one faith can certain resonances that Christian claim to have a monopoly on describing mysticism has with the Tantra of the the elephant, and every spiritual East. It is in this context that we will tradition can beneﬁt from the experience look to the vocabulary, images, and even of others. deities drawn from the world of Tantra to clarify, through correlation, the path ur particularity also includes of Christian transformation. Our hope is our bodies, minds, and to offer an invitation into this exciting, Oemotional patterns. The blissful, and powerful path in a way Divine, which transcends all categories, relevant for today’s seeker and devoid of is our elephant. To enhance how we the unwanted and unhelpful baggage of know the elephant, we can productively the past that would only confuse the engage the knowledge that has emerged simple but profound and life-giving from other differing and distinctive truths of the Christian mystical path. contexts. It’s important to be clear that Our hope is that as we explore a we are not saying that at some point we Christian Tantra we will dust off jewels can gather enough blind men and in our mystical treasure house that have women to know the elephant in its been buried for centuries, and place entirety, or to know some universal or them in new settings that will not only Platonic elephant divorced from the bring us greater joy and vitality and experiences of the blind men. We never peace than we have ever known, but will fully know the elephant, at least not encourage and enliven us to be of deep when that elephant is the Divine. We service to the world. can, however, come to a very deep knowledge of our own perceptions of 1 Vladimir Lossky, THE MYSTICAL THEOLOGY OF THE EASTERN CHURCH (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's the elephant, and we can enhance our Seminary Press, 1976), 32. perceptions through hearing the 2 Rainier Maria Rilke, POEMS FROM THE BOOK OF HOURS, perceptions of others, shared in open trans. Babette Deutsch (New York: New and respectful dialogue. Perhaps we Directions, 1975), 21. 3 For more on John Hick and religious pluralism, come to assimilate two such sets of see John Hick, AN INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION: HUMAN experiences and perceptions. Such a RESPONSES TO THE TRANSCENDENT, 2nd ed. (New Haven: process can open a living space within Yale University Press, 2004). us where resonances arising from a plurality of belongings enhance our TANTRIC JESUS by James Hughes Reho © 2017 Destiny Books. Printed with permission from the own native tradition and help us publisher Inner Traditions International. understand it and express it in new and www.InnerTraditions.com

SPRING 2017 | 101 The I Ching and Synchronicity

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UNG WAS LARGELY RESPONSIBLE for making the I Ching known to the Western world. He did so by writing the foreword to JRichard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching into German, in 1929. This “contributed in no small measure to the acceptance of the book in Western intellectual circles.” The English edition, re- translated by Cary Baynes, appeared in 1949. When approached by Wilhelm, Jung had already known the I Ching for some years, and was fascinated by it. In MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS he says: I would sit for hours beneath the hundred year-old pear tree, the I Ching beside me, practising the technique by referring the resultant oracles to one another in an interplay of questions and answers. All sorts of undeniably remarkable results emerged—meaningful connections with my own thought processes which I could not explain to myself.

Jung and Wilhelm met in the early 1920s. Richard Wilhelm was a theologian and missionary, who lived in China for twenty-ﬁve years. His knowledge of the Chinese language enabled him to translate the I Ching and other classical works into German. Translations from German into English and other languages soon followed.... The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is one of the ﬁrst efforts of the human mind to place itself within the universe. The I Ching portrays the changing balance between the forces of yin and yang.

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Yin is represented by a broken line, typical situations. A basic interpretation and yang by an unbroken line. There relates to the force of yin or yang rising are eight sets of three lines. One set has through the lines. So a reading with three unbroken lines, another three five yang lines, and a single yin line at broken lines. Three more have one the top, would suggest that yin energy broken line, at the bottom, in the is dying away and yang energy is almost middle or at the top. The last three completely dominant. This particular have one unbroken line at the bottom, reading (no. 43) is called in the middle or the top. Each reading “Breakthrough” in many translations. consists of two hexagrams, an upper The Book of Changes provides and a lower, so that the I Ching offers interpretations of each reading, and of 8 x 8, i.e., 64 possible readings, or each line in the reading.

SPRING 2017 | 103 The questioner throws three coins state of the questioner and the together, six times, and notes how many answering hexagram.” “heads” or “tails” are shown on the Synchronicity is most easily defined coins after each throw. The questioner as “a meaningful coincidence.” It is looks up the result in a table which “a coincidence in time of two or more indicates the relevant reading to be causally unrelated events which have consulted. According to the old the same or a similar meaning.” Or tradition, it is ‘“spiritual agencies,’ again: “the simultaneous occurrence of acting in a mysterious way, that...give a a certain psychic state with one or meaningful answer.” In Jung’s view, more external events which appear as the reading simply mirrors the meaningful parallels to the momentary questioner’s inner situation in some subjective state.” Marie-Louise von way. Even in English translation, the Franz provides a helpful example: various interpretations may seem If an aircraft crashes before my eyes as I obscure. They are full of unfamiliar am blowing my nose, this is a coincidence imagery relating to life in ancient of events that has no meaning. It is simply China. The questioner needs some a chance occurrence of a kind that imagination in order to grasp a happens all the time. But if I bought a meaning that is relevant. For example, blue frock and, by mistake, the shop I might ask, “Should I change my delivered a black one on the day one of my near relatives died, this would be a job?” If I receive reading no. 48, “The meaningful coincidence. The two events Well,” I will read that the well remains are not causally related, but they are in the middle of the town and provides connected by the symbolic meaning that water for all who go to it. I could our society gives to the colour black. interpret this as “Stay where you are, you are doing useful work.” Jung gives an example. He was Jung acknowledges that a Western working with a young woman and psychologist might say that Jung had talking about her dream of a golden projected his own unconscious scarab, when a European form of scarab contents into the interpretation of the beetle started knocking itself against the hexagram. Yet that is exactly its value: window pane, “which contrary to its to function as a mirror for our as-yet usual habits had evidently felt an urge to unrealized thoughts. get into a dark room at this particular Too often Westerners use the I moment.” Jung pointed out the parallel, Ching to predict what will happen in and the shock of the coincidence was a particular situation, as a means of enough to disturb her rigidly rational fortune-telling. This is not its attitude and allow the process of purpose. The I Ching simply shows transformation to begin. Jung notes that how things are for the questioner in the scarab is an Egyptian symbol of this moment when the coins are rebirth. The dead sun-god changes thrown; it shows the psychic energies himself into a scarab and “mounts the available at this moment. As Jung barge which carries the rejuvenated sun- puts it, “The I Ching presupposes god into the morning sky.” that there is a synchronistic So the I Ching is based on correspondence between the psychic synchronicity. In fact, it is synchronicity

104 | PARABOLA Synchronicity merely indicates that the coincidence of two events demonstrates a meaning, and it is a meaning of which the individual was not previously aware. which is the real intellectual bombshell, principle, and psychology...cannot be and its implications have not yet been exhausted by causal methods only, absorbed into Western thinking. because the mind lives by aims as well.” Synchronicity does not attribute cause These are ultimately the aims of the Self, and effect to events, it stands beyond driving the development of the causality. Synchronicity merely indicates individual’s personality towards that the coincidence of two events wholeness. So a synchronicity, and its demonstrates a meaning, and it is a meaning for the individual, is the Self’s meaning of which the individual was not effort to further that individual’s previously aware. personality development, little by little. G. Bright understands Jung to say Obviously we cannot know in detail that “if meaningful coincidences cannot where the Self is leading us; we can only be explained 0,01!0,*.(/+1.$1/(*&."-"11$,.&1 0,'01*+&#%+ assimilate the causally, then .$1 &('0 1 )#*1/.*.),0#/11!/-"-1!/0# meaning of the the connecting momentary principle must synchronicity. For lie in the ‘equal work in therapy or signiﬁcance’ of analysis, this means parallel events.” that any So when two interpretations can events create a only be provisional. meaningful No-one can coincidence, presume to know the symbolic the truth, and meaning that therapy or analysis they have in must always be a common is the joint search for meaning of the meaning. This synchronicity. accords with the Obviously no view that no symbol interpretation can ever be fully of cause and known, and can effect is always produce possible. Bright further meanings. quotes Jung: The psyche “Causality is stretches out only one towards inﬁnity. As

SPRING 2017 | 105 !0,%1("*01 (') 1(,-/ 1 Jung puts it, “the psyche, in its deepest face turned towards the individual reaches, participates in a form of personality. When the Self initiates a existence beyond space and time, and synchronistic meaning, that meaning thus partakes of what is symbolically must ﬁrst exist in the collective or described as ‘eternity.’” transpersonal realm. The meaning is The Self does not only exist within conveyed to the individual psyche only the individual psyche: the Self is by the synchronistic event. collective. The individual simply has Our Western minds rebel against this access to the Self. The Self can be idea. We have always assumed that described as having one face turned meaning is latent in the psyche of the towards the transpersonal, and another individual. If this were true for

106 | PARABOLA synchronicity, then we would have to say developing early in the twentieth that the synchronicity was somehow century, at the time when Jung was brought about by the individual. The developing his own ideas. Quantum implication would be that the individual mechanics, also known as quantum psyche works on matter, e.g., on the physics or quantum theory is, way the I Ching coins fall. Yet only according to Wiki, “the body of spoon-benders have ever been able to scientific principles that explains the change matter through the mind. behaviour of matter and its Usually it is magical thinking that interactions with energy on the scale deludes us into believing that we can of atoms and subatomic particles.” influence matter or events simply by Atomic scientists discovered that the imagining, or by superstitious actions. electrons in an atom can move in In magical thinking, we believe that our unpredictable ways. This research thoughts can affect the external world. shattered Newtonian laws of cause That is impossible. So we cannot say and effect, which had dominated that the meaning within a synchronicity science for the previous two hundred exists within the individual psyche. years. The concept of acausality began Well, if the individual mind does not to emerge in atomic research. shape a synchronicity, what does? When Science students will know that in a synchronicity occurs, archetypal an atom, electrons rotate around the energies have influenced matter, and nucleus in a series of orbits. When an perhaps events in time as well. electron takes on an extra charge of Synchronicity clearly demonstrates that energy (when heat or electricity is archetypal activity has the capacity to applied to the substance), the electron affect both psyche and matter. Such moves up to a higher orbit for a time. activity specifically occurs outside the This is known as a “quantum leap.” It conscious realm, and outside the will of then falls back to its previous orbit, the individual. Both are excluded from emitting its added energy as a photon such activity. Jung called the archetype of light. which straddles both matter and psyche But significantly, when an atom is the psychoid archetype. It is the energised it cannot be predicted whether psychoid archetype—prompted by the any given electron in it will traverse, for Self—that produces a synchronicity.... example, from one orbit to another by going Once that link between mind and from its home orbit to a higher orbit level body was established, the study of directly, or by stopping along the way at psychosomatic illness blossomed in the intermediate orbits. twentieth century. The reader is referred So the quantum leaps of an electron to the article in this book on seem to be acausal. homeopathy, a healing that works first It was not only acausality, but also the on the spiritual level and permeates to idea of the psychoid archetype that fitted the physical level. the new theories of atomic physics. One An indirect form of support for of the leading researchers, Wolfgang these ideas of Jung’s came from the Pauli, worked in analysis with Jung, and science of atomic physics. The the two men maintained a friendly theories of quantum mechanics were correspondence. Pauli expresses one of

SPRING 2017 | 107 the laws of the new the set of probabilities to reduce to only physics that “the one of the possible values immediately consistent investigator after the measurement. This feature is known as wave function collapse. of the unknown interior of the atom Pauli believed that this principle also could not help seeing existed in the psyche. As he says, that the nature of the ...the concepts “conscious and ‘unconscious” .%$)0')10(%- 1 observing process seem[s] to offer a pretty close analogy to the becomes perceptible in the disturbance “complementarity” situation in physics. caused by the observation.” This is a Every “observation of the unconscious,” i.e., scientific expression of the link every conscious realisation of unconscious between psyche and matter, or the contents, has an uncontrollable reactive psychoid archetype. effect on these same contents.... Jung had a strong inﬂuence on This inner and outer “mirroring” Pauli’s later work. “Pauli became of the complementarity principle was, intensely interested in developing a new Pauli believed, an important step perspective that brought together forward in reconciling the opposites physics with Jung’s analytical psychology of physics and the psyche. yet transcended them both.” Since So far, the definition of Einstein’s time, it had been known that synchronicity used in this article has light behaves as both a wave and a been, “the coincidence of a psychic particle. The more light is measured as state in the observer with a a wave, the less light seems like a simultaneous, objective, external particle. Put more scientiﬁcally, event that corresponds to the psychic ...objects have complementary properties state or content (e.g., the scarab).” that cannot be measured at the same time. Where there is no evidence of a causal The more accurately one property is connection between the psychic state measured, the less accurately the and the external event, Jung adds two complementary property is measured. other categories of synchronicity. One is the coincidence of a psychic state Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and an external event occurring at a made an interpretation of the distance. For example I may dream of meaning of quantum mechanics my cousin’s car crash at the time it between 1925 and 1927. This is occurs—in a foreign country. known as the Copenhagen The other category is the interpretation. Again, a link between coincidence of a psychic state and an matter and psyche is implied. external event occurring at a distance According to the Copenhagen in time. For example I may have a interpretation, physical systems generally strong intuition that my cousin do not have definite properties prior to should not drive while she is being measured, and quantum travelling in Europe. Two weeks later, mechanics can only predict the she has a car crash. These second two probabilities that measurements will categories can also be described as produce certain results. The act of forms of telepathy. Jung points out measurement affects the system, causing that the “psychic state” of telepathic

108 | PARABOLA perceptions “occur as if in part there complication and see the spirit in the were no space, in part no time”. He storms body and matter throw at us. suggests an explanation: This is Jung’s contribution to us and our time. In man’s original view of the world, as References: we find it among primitives, space and G. Bright, “Synchronicity as a Basis of Analytic time have a very precarious existence. Attitude,” JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY, They became ‘fixed’ concepts only in the October 1997, 613-35 course of his mental development, thanks largely to the introduction of A. Douglas, THE ORACLE OF CHANGES (Middlesex, UK: measurement. In themselves, space and Penguin Books, 1971) time consist of nothing. They are hypostatised concepts born of the C. Dunne, CARL JUNG: WOUNDED HEALER OF THE SOUL discriminating activity of the conscious (New York: Parabola Books, 2000) mind, and they form the indispensable co-ordinate for describing the behaviour M. J. Greenberg, INTRODUCTION TO THE INTERPRETATION of bodies in motion. They are, therefore, OF NATURE AND THE PSYCHE (New York: Ishi Press, 2012) essentially psychic in origin....

C. G. Jung, “On Synchronicity” in THE STRUCTURE Fascinatingly, Einstein’s theory of AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE (Princeton, NJ: CW 8 relativity includes the concept that Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1951) “Measurements of various quantities are relative to the velocities of C. G. Jung, ‘The Soul and Death’ in THE STRUCTURE observers. In particular, space AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE, (Princeton, NJ: CW 8 contracts and time dilates.” Of course Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1934) the implications of all this are all highly speculative. C. G. Jung, FOREWORD TO THE I CHING IN PSYCHOLOGY The I Ching remains popular in the AND RELIGION (Princeton, NJ: CW 11 Bollingen West, but the world view on which it Series, Princeton University Press, 1950) is based has had a far deeper influence on Western culture. The I Ching has C. G. Jung, “Synchronicity, an Acausal Connecting Principle” in THE INTERPRETATION OF played its part in helping Westerners NATURE AND THE PSYCHE (New York: Ishi Press, 2012) to understand the unity of existence, A. S. Sabbadini, “Eranos, Synchronicity, and the I ...that the outer world is also a subject Ching” in SPRING, Vol. 92 Spring 2015, New and when we experience our own Orleans personality being reoriented through the

meaningful activity of material events in J. G. Sparks, AT THE HEART OF MATTER: SYNCHRONICITY the outer world, we soften. The outer AND JUNG’S SPIRITUAL TESTAMENT (Toronto: Inner City world is no longer something to act on Books, 2007) and control, it is a place asking us for a relationship.... M-L. Von Franz in eds. C. G. Jung & M-L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols (London: Aldus Further: Books, 1964)

THE I CHING OR BOOK OF CHANGES (Princeton, NJ: For more and more people, the spirit no CW 9 Bollingen Series, Princeton University longer comes down from above. It Press, 1961) emerges up from matter and is there for those who are willing to accept the earth’s Wikipedia website: “Theory of Relativity”

SPRING 2017 | 109 WELCOMEPARABOLA TO THE BACK ISSUE LIBRARY CHOOSE FROM 162 BACK ISSUES TO INFORM, INSPIRE, AND GUIDE YOU ON YOUR JOURNEY. All Back Issues listed as in print below are $12.50 plus shipping and handling. All Back Issues listed in green below are out-of-print but are available here as Parabola Archived papereditions at $20.00 each plus shipping and handling, or as electronic files for $7.50 each at www.parabola.org. 1:1 THE HERO In quest of the meaning of Self 12:1 THE KNIGHT & THE HERMIT Heroes of action and reflection 1:2 MAGIC The power that transforms 12:2 ADDICTION The prison of human craving 1:3 INITIATION A portal to rebirth 12:3 FORGIVENESS The past transcended 1:4 RITES OF PASSAGE Symbols and rituals of transformation 12:4 THE SENSE OF HUMOR Walking with laughter 2:1 DEATH Beyond the limits of the known 13:1 THE CREATIVE RESPONSE To represent the sacred 2:2 CREATION From formlessness, something new 13:2 REPETITION & RENEWAL Respecting the rhythm of growth 2:3 COSMOLOGY The order of things, seen and unseen 13:3 QUESTIONS The road to understanding 2:4 RELATIONSHIPS Our interwoven human experience 13:4 THE MOUNTAIN A meeting place of Earth and Heaven 3:1 SACRED SPACE Landscapes, temples, the inner terrain 14:1 DISCIPLES & DISCIPLINE Teachers, masters, students, fools 3:2 SACRIFICE & TRANSFORMATION Stepping into a holy fire 14:2 TRADITION & TRANSMISSION Passages from wisdom into wisdom 3:3 INNER ALCHEMY Refining the gold within 14:3 THE TREE OF LIFE Root, trunk, and crown of our search 3:4 ANDROGYNY The fusion of male and female 14:4 TRIAD Sacred and secular laws of three 4:1 THE TRICKSTER Guide, mischief-maker, master of disguise 15:1 TIME & PRESENCE How to welcome the present moment 4:2 SACRED DANCE Moving to worship, moving to transcend 15:2 ATTENTION What animates mind, body, and feeling 4:3 THE CHILD Setting out from innocence 15:3 LIBERATION Freedom from what, freedom for what? 4:4 STORYTELLING & EDUCATION Speaking to young minds 15:4 HOSPITALITY Care in human relationships 5:1 THE OLD ONES Visions of our elders 16:1 MONEY Exchange between humans, and with the divine 5:2 MUSIC, SOUND, & SILENCE Echoes of stillness 16:2 THE HUNTER Stalking great knowledge 5:3 OBSTACLES In the way, or the Way itself? 16:3 CRAFT The skill that leads to creation 5:4 WOMAN In search of the feminine 16:4 THE GOLDEN MEAN Balance between defect and excess 17:1 SOLITUDE & COMMUNITY The self, alone and with others 6:1 EARTH & SPIRIT Opposites or complements? 17:2 LABYRINTH The path to inner treasure 6:2 THE DREAM OF PROGRESS Our modern fantasy 17:3 THE ORAL TRADITION Transmission by spoken word and silence 6:3 MASK & METAPHOR When things are not as they seem 17:4 POWER & ENERGY The stunning array of atom and cosmos 6:4 DEMONS Spirits of the dark 18:1 HEALING The return to a state of health 7:1 SLEEP To be restored, or to forget 18:2 PLACE & SPACE Seeking the holy in mountain, sea,and vale 7:2 DREAMS & SEEING Visions, fantasy, and the unconscious 18:3 CROSSROADS The meeting place of traditions and ideas 7:3 CEREMONIES Seeking divine service 18:4 THE CITY Hub of the human world 7:4 HOLY WAR Conflict for the sake of reconciliation 19:1 THE CALL To ask for help, to receive what is given 8:1 GUILT The burden of conscience 19:2 TWINS The two who come from one 8:2 ANIMALS The nature of the creature world 19:3 CLOTHING Concealing and revealing our inner selves 8:3 WORDS OF POWER Secret words, magic spells, divine utterances 19:4 HIDDEN TREASURE Value, hope, and knowledge 8:4 SUN & MOON Partners in time as fields of force 20:1 EARTH, AIR, WATER, FIRE Essential elements of all things 9:1 HIERARCHY The ladder of the sacred 20:2 THE STRANGER Messenger or deceiver, savior or threat 9:2 THEFT The paradox of possession 20:3 LANGUAGE & MEANING Communication, symbol, and sign 9:3 PILGRIMAGE Journey toward the holy 20:4 EROS Human sexuality and the life of the spirit 9:4 FOOD Nourishing body and spirit 21:1 PROPHETS & PROPHECY Seeing beyond the veil 10:1 WHOLENESS The hunger for completion 21:2 THE SOUL Life within and beyond our corporeal existence 10:2 EXILE Cut off from the homeland of meaning 21:3 PEACE Seeking inner and outer tranquility 10:3 THE BODY Half dust, half deity 21:4 PLAY & WORK Struggle and release in the search for meaning 10:4 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS The mystery of goodness 22:1 WAYS OF KNOWING Different avenues to truth 11:1 THE WITNESS Silent guides and unsleeping eyes 22:2 THE SHADOW Cast by the light we follow 11:2 MIRRORS That which reflects the real 22:3 CONSCIENCE & CONSCIOUSNESS Inner guides to 11:3 SADNESS The transformation of tragedy understanding one’s being 11:4 MEMORY & FORGETTING What we remember and why 22:4 MIRACLES Enigmatic breaks in the laws of nature 110 | PARABOLA 23:1 MILLENNIUM To what end, 32:1 FAITH Seven great acts of faith to what beginning? 32:2 SEX Spiritual teachings on sex 23:2 ECSTASY Joy that transports 32:3 HOLY EARTH Our sacred planet 32:4 THE NEW WORLD Frontiers of the spiritual us outside of ourselves 23:3 FEAR Sign of weakness, or of strength? 33:1 SILENCE The place of not speaking 33:2 GOD Approaching the Unknown 23:4 BIRTH AND REBIRTH Journey toward renewal 33:3 MAN & MACHINE Traditions & technology 24:1 NATURE Exploring inner and outer terrain 33:4 JUSTICE The Divine measure 24:2 PRAYER & MEDITATION Petition, praise, 34:1 IMAGINATION The story issue gratitude, confession 34:2 WATER The sacred element 24:3 NUMBER & SYMBOL Languages that disclose the real 34:3 THE PATH Finding the right way 34:4 THE FUTURE The way ahead 24:4 EVIL The duality within us, within the world Mirabai Starr Prayer How to Find Alejandro Jodorowsky Meditation a Spiritual Teacher 35:1 LOVE The divine energy Kindness 25:1 THRESHOLD Neither here nor there, real nor imaginary PARABOLA 35:2 LIFE AFTER DEATH Beyond the known Where Spiritual Traditions Meet 25:2 RIDDLE & MYSTERY Questions and answers 35:3 DESIRE What compels our lives? 25:3 THE TEACHER One who shows the way 35:4 BEAUTY What transports us; where do 25:4 FATE AND FORTUNE Inevitabilities that speak to us we look? 36:1 SUFFERING To be with it, and to let it be Spiritual 26:1 THE GARDEN Cultivating within and without Practice 36:2 GIVING & RECEIVING Gift of life, flow of 26:2 LIGHT That which illuminates our inner and outer darkness mediating energies

26:3 THE FOOL In search of divine innocence FALL 2014 36:3 SEEING An act of attentiveness in body, PLEASE DISPLAY UNTIL October 31, 2014 26:4 THE HEART Where the quest begins and ends mind, and heart $9.50 / $11.50 CANADA 36:4 MANY PATHS ONE TRUTH Finding the 27:1 THE EGO AND THE “I” Which one is real? light, within and without 27:2 DYING Ending or beginning of transformation? 37:1 BURNING WORLD Healing a world in crisis 27:3 GRACE Gifts bestowed from above 37:2 ALONE & TOGETHER Balancing solitude and community 27:4 WAR Violence as a means to an end 37:3 THE UNKNOWN We, ourselves, are the deepest unknown 28:1 COMPASSION Actions that embrace others 37:4 SCIENCE & SPIRIT How both serve to apprehend Reality 28:2 PRISON Inner and outer conﬁnement 38:1 SPIRIT IN THE WORLD Reﬂections on embodiment 28:3 CHAOS AND ORDER The interplay of 38:2 HEAVEN & HELL Symbolic and timeless, real and present creative forces 38:3 POWER Ancient power, new power, sustaining force 28:4 TRUTH AND ILLUSION Seeking clarity amidst confusion 38:4 LIBERATION & LETTING GO Freedom comes with unbinding 29:1 MARRIAGE Union with the Other 39:1 WISDOM The ability to perceive reality with equanimity 39:2 EMBODIMENT The quest for living truth 29:2 WEB OF LIFE The interrelationship of being 39:3 SPIRITUAL PRACTICE To make room within for the sacred 29:3 THE SEEKER In search of the Way 39:4 GOODNESS An echo of the call to come together 29:4 FRIENDSHIP Companions on the path Heroic acts, Working With The miraculous Everyday Compassion Mother Teresa monastery of Mt. Sinai 40:1 SIN Missing the mark, staining the inner life 30:1 AWAKENING Casting off slumber PARABOLA40:2 ANGELS & DEMONS Eternal forms for struggle The Search for Meaning 30:2 RESTRAINT The power of not doing 40:3 INTELLIGENCE Reciprical sharing, human & divine Generosity 40:4 FREE WILL & DESTINY What is written, and how do 30:3 BODY AND SOUL Two mysteries & Service our choices matter? 30:4 FUNDAMENTALISM Getting out of the box 41:1 THE DIVINE FEMININE Creation and the mystery 31:1 COMING TO OUR SENSES Shaking our senses free of renewal 41:2 INNOCENCE & EXPERIENCE Seeing life anew 31:2 ABSENCE AND LONGING The path of yearning every moment 31:3 THINKING Thinking as prayer 41:3 WAYS OF HEALING Paths toward wholeness

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112 | PARABOLA qÜÉ=ÖçÇë=Ü~Ç=ÖáîÉå=Üáã=~äãçëí=ÉîÉêóíÜáåÖKKKK

You Will Find It Waiting for You

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In 1895, Oscar Wilde, the most celebrated literary ﬁgure of his age, was convicted of “gross indecency” for homosexual activity and was sentenced to two years in prison. While behind bars, Wilde wrote a ﬁfty-thousand word letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, later published as the book DE PROFUNDIS. What follows is a brief excerpt from that work. –The Editors

HE GODS HAD GIVEN ME ALMOST EVERYTHING. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused Tmyself with being a ﬂâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

SPRING 2017 | 113 I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said— have come before, nor later. Had any Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would And has the nature of infinity. have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing But while there were times when I that has in it the elements of life, of a rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings new life, Vita Nuova for me. Of all were to be endless, I could not bear things it is the strangest. One cannot them to be without meaning. Now I acquire it, except by surrendering find hidden somewhere away in my everything that one has. It is only when nature something that tells me that one has lost all things, that one knows nothing in the whole world is that one possesses it. meaningless, and suffering least of all. Now I have realized that it is in me, I That something hidden away in my see quite clearly what I ought to do; in nature, like a treasure in a field, is fact, must do. And when I use such a Humility. phrase as that, I need not say that I am It is the last thing left in me, and the not alluding to any external sanction or best: the ultimate discovery at which I command. I admit none. I am far more have arrived, the starting-point for a of an individualist than I ever was. fresh development. It has come to me Nothing seems to me of the smallest right out of myself, so I know that it has value except what one gets out of come at the proper time. It could not oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh

114 | PARABOLA heart. The external things of life seem to me now of no importance at all. You can see to what intensity of individualism I have arrived—or am arriving rather, for the journey is long, and “where I walk there are thorns.” Of course I know that to ask alms on the highway is not to be my lot, and that if ever I lie in the cool grass at night-time it will be to write sonnets to the moon. When I go out of prison, R— will be waiting for me on the other side of the big iron-studded gate, and he is the symbol, not mode of self-realization. That is all I am merely of his own affection, but of the concerned with. And the first thing that affection of many others besides. I I have got to do is to free myself from believe I am to have enough to live on any possible bitterness of feeling against for about eighteen months at any rate, the world. so that if I may not write beautiful I am completely penniless, and books, I may at least read beautiful absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse books; and what joy can be greater? things in the world than that. I am quite After that, I hope to be able to recreate candid when I say that rather than go my creative faculty. out from this prison with bitterness in But were things different: had I not a my heart against the world, I would friend left in the world; were there not a gladly and readily beg my bread from single house open to me in pity; had I to door to door. If I got nothing from the accept the wallet and ragged cloak of house of the rich I would get something sheer penury: as long as I am free from at the house of the poor. Those who all resentment, hardness and scorn, I have much are often greedy; those who would be able to face the life with much have little always share. I would not a bit more calm and confidence than I would mind sleeping in the cool grass in were my body in purple and fine linen, summer, and when winter came on and the soul within me sick with hate. sheltering myself by the warm close- And I really shall have no difficulty. thatched rick, or under the penthouse of When you really want love you will find a great barn, provided I had love in my it waiting for you.

SPRING 2017 | 115 Book Review

IN THE BEGINNING WAS LOVE: Contemplative Words of Robert Lax ROBERT LAX. S.T. GEORGIOU, EDITOR. TEMPLEGATE (WWW.TEMPLEGATE.COM), 2015. PP. 136. $15.95 PAPER Reviewed by Richard Whittaker

HIS BOOK CAME INTO MY HANDS UNEXPECTEDLY. Perhaps I’d consider reviewing it. Then I noticed the Tname on the cover: Robert Lax. Oh, my. That took me back. I’d run across his name decades earlier, but hadn’t taken the time to acquaint myself with his work. There was a connection with Thomas Merton, wasn’t there? And lingering in memory was my impression of Lax as a singular ﬁgure.

116 | PARABOLA The Siddhis Powers of Conscioousness TOM KENYON

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SPRING 2017 | 117 In the book’s foreword, Jonathan becoming a saint. And lest this sound Montaldo writes of Lax that “he too wild, he adds that Paul the Apostle subdued fame. [I]f anyone else read his wrote in the EPISTLES that all men are work it was purely through grace, and called to be saints. he left it at that.” This was no small So now the time had come, thing because as a young man, Lax apparently, for me to meet this wrote for TIME magazine, was an editor mysterious figure—with Georgiou, who for the NEW YORKER, and founded the had known Lax, as intermediary. He peace magazine PAX. In other words, he met Lax in 1993 on Patmos— was well positioned to make a name for serendipitously, as he writes. Then, after himself. But as the compiler and editor meeting the poet/sage, he, along with of this anthology, S.T. Georgiou, writes, other ardent searchers, intermittently “Lax’s attitude, even in terms of returned to the isle to meet with him writing, was purified of notions of until his death in 2000. reputation, success; rather it was Turning my attention to this small steeped in disinterestedness, in holiness, volume, my intuition that a rare charity….” Georgiou adds that Lax document had come into my hands was advised his friend, Merton, not to aim quickly confirmed. Not everyone might at being a good Catholic, but at feel this way. One could come to the

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118 | PARABOLA Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1941 C. G. Jung Edited by John Peck, Lorenz Jung & Maria Meyer-Grass Translated by Ernst Falzeder with the collaboration of Tony Woolfson

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SPRING 2017 | 119 “Indigo Animal has a great deal to tell us about a fundamental, secret aspect of love.” work of Robert Lax too soon and miss —from the foreward by Jacob Needleman its depth. But eventually one could welcome with gratitude, even with joy, his discernment that stripped away all embellishment. The simplicity of his writing is the reduction that makes clear what one has glimpsed and lost sight of over and over again. this bread Hard cover 319 pages over 400 illustrations is For searchers of any age bread

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SPRING 2017 | 121 Do children C have a Found in Translation! spiritual life? Can it be nurtured, Forgotten Language of Children encouraged to be now available in Spanish and inwardly free? in Turkish both in soft cover This unique book offers a modest corrective to with all original content. contemporary education, a Fourth Way In Spanish: experience for adults and children alike. El Languaje Olvidado A must for parents de los Ninos and educators. contact: [email protected] from the Foreword by Robert Thurman Professor of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University: “This book is of inestimable value to all of us.” In Turkish: Hard cover 300 pgs. C 60 photos C now Cocularin Unutulan dili available as an “E” book TO ORDER: contact:[email protected] www.amazon.com OR C bythewaybooks.com

Or here is the complete piece without For the man one talks to its formatting: (when one talks to the inner self) is not at all the man the world knows. This bread is bread. This wine is wine. This It can almost be said bread is bread. This wine is wine. These he is not the man hands are hands. These hands are hands. the man himself knows. This bread is bread. This wine is wine. Reading Lax’s work, I found myself As Georgiou writes, the inner life of thinking about his contemporary, the Robert Lax is the primary theme of this artist Agnes Martin. She worked anthology. And he quotes Merton: “Lax “with her back to the world,” as she was much wiser than I, had clearer wrote. I see them as much alike. Both vision … he had seen what was the one found something that’s deeply absent important thing.” in today’s culture. What Martin found

122 | PARABOLA nearly tangible: after many years of searching, and the value of survival. which provided direction, she called humility. She also said “all art is This echoes what I heard a Tibetan about beauty.” In essence, humility Buddhist, Lobsang Rapgay, a permits entrance for the luminous, professional psychologist from Los which is one way of describing the Angeles, say at a conference of spiritual work and life of Robert Lax. leaders in the 1980s. He spoke of As noted in the book’s foreword, aesthetic thought. It wasn’t clear to me “These poems and meditations what he meant by that, exactly. That collected by a foremost student of kind of thought, he said, was difﬁcult. Lax’s literary work come just at the In the West we were too exhausted to right time. We live in a confusion of be able to practice it. He went on to say words, pronouncements and points of that when it reached a certain level, the view; nothing centrally meaningful numinous could be brought down into seems to hold.” circulation in a culture. Without that, he Where, one might ask, can we turn said, a culture could not survive. for wisdom? It’s a question Lax ponders. what is the value of wisdom? many values, Richard Whittaker is the West Coast but editor of Parabola and the founding perhaps the most obvious, the most editor of works & conversations.

SPRING 2017 | 123 124 | PARABOLA SPRING 2017 | 125 CREDITS COVER PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by Dino Reichmuth PP.74-75 PHOTO from SAK Organisation and Swinburne Astronomy PP.8-9 PHOTO: Unsplash.com Photo by Ashley Batz Productions P.10 PHOTO: Flickr.com. Photo (cropped) by Brandon Zierer. P.76 PHOTO: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sonqua-southern- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ san-history-art-after-contact-neil-rusch P.13 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Source: P.77 PHOTO © Neil Rusch, personal archive http://collections.si.edu P.78 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Source: PIA01481 P.14 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Richard Mayer PP.82-83 PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by Shreyas Malavalli PP.16-17 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Photo by British Museum P.84 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Laitche P. 19 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Enrique López- P.87 PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by John Salzarulo Tamayo Biosca P.90 PHOTO: P.20 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Konrad Kurzacz. User: https://a248.e.akamai.net/secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/eve Pimke nt/[-] 8/b/3/0/highres_180755632.jpeg PP.22-23 PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by Benjamin Balázs P.93 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Krenn9 P.24 PHOTO: Flickr.com. Photo by Susornpol Joe Watanatchote. P.94 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ / CC BY-SA 3.0 PP.26-27 PHOTO: Flickr.com. Photo by young shanahan. P.96 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Andreas Wahra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ P.99 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Source: United States Library PP.30-31 PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by James Douglas of Congress P.34 PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by Arushi Saini P.100 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Gebhard Fugel P.37 PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by Ben White P.103 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Source/photographer: P.39 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Source: The Yorck Project Perkins, Franklin. Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004 P.40 (TOP) PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. User: Velvet. (Bottom) Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Source: http://www.wikipaint- P.105 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Chiswick Chap ings.org/en P.106 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Source: Library of Congress P.42 PHOTO: Unsplash.com. Photo by Noah Rosenﬁeld P.108 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Nobel Foundation P.47 PHOTO: Wikimedia commons. Source: Telling Images of China. P.112 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Jack1956 Dublin: Chester Beatty Library PP.114-15 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Source: P.48 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Russell Lee. Source: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/enemies-of-the- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration state/2013/04/10/reading-gaol-a-very-short-history/ P.49 PHOTO: https://pixabay.com/en/animal-australia-australian- P.126 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Eric Santos. brown-1298878/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en P.52 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Russell Lee. Source: P.128 PHOTO: http://www.photistoric.com/wp/content/uploads U.S. National Archives and Records Administration P.56 ART by Pema Nandol Thaye and courtesy of Shambhala Publications, Inc. PP.60-61 PHOTOS courtesy of Alexander Vesely and Mary Cimiluca P.62 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Prof. Dr. Franz Vesely P.66 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Harvey W Cohen P.69 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of the Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press P.71 PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Isabell Schulz. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en P.73 PHOTO by and courtesy of Richard Whittaker Happiness PARABOLAThe next issue of

Fall 2017: THE SACRED

Winter 2017-2018: GRATITUDE

126 | PARABOLA PROFILES SAMUEL BERCHOLZ, the founder of decades. Her new book, translated Shambhala Publications, has taught from the Chinese, is DAO DE JING: Buddhist philosophy and meditation LAOZI’S TIMELESS WISDOM (Humanitas for more than forty years. Press, 2016). Learn more at www.dianduchinreed.com. CAROL BERRY has for many years lec- tured and led retreats on the spiritual JAMES HUGHES REHO is an Episcopal teaching of Henri Nouwen and priest, a yoga instructor, and a Vincent van Gogh. Kirtan leader who has been initiated into several spiritual lineages, both CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT is an Episcopal priest, teacher, and retreat leader. East and West. He now serves as Senior Pastor of Lamb of God Among her many books are THE Lutheran Episcopal Church in Ft. MEANING OF MARY MAGDALENE and THE Myers, Florida. HOLY TRINITY AND THE LAW OF THREE. NEIL RUSCH is an independent pub- TRACY COCHRAN is editorial director of Parabola. lisher, editor, and author. His most recent work is SONQUA: SOUTHERN SAN HENRY FERSKO-WEISS is executive HISTORY AND ART AFTER CONTACT, by director of the International End-of- Pieter Jolly. Life Doula Association. TCHESLAW TCHEKHOVITCH (1900- FRAN GRACE serves as professor of reli- 1958) was a longtime student of gious studies and steward of the med- G.I. Gurdjieff. itation program at the University of Redlands in California. ALAN WATTS (1915–1973) was a popular interpreter of Eastern philosophy SUSAN ISHMAEL works as a freelance in the West. He spoke to millions writer and editor and has had short through his recordings, radio broad- stories, poetry, and articles published casts, and books, including such clas- in multiple magazines, newspapers, sics as THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY, BECOME and journals. She is the co-founder of WHAT YOU ARE, and his new book, WhatWomenWriteTX.blogspot.com, adapted from recordings of live pre- a blog devoted to issues of writing sentations by his son and archivist, craft and publishing. Mark Watts, OUT OF YOUR MIND: ANNETTE LOWE is a Jungian analyst in TRICKSTERS, INDEPENDENCE, AND THE COSMIC private practice. Her first book, JUNG GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK (Sounds True, TALKS (2011), celebrated fifty years March 2017). of the C.G. Jung Society of RICHARD WHITTAKER is the founding Melbourne, Australia. editor of works & conversations and MAURICE NICOLL (1884-1953) was a West Coast editor of Parabola. British psychiatrist and a student of OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) was G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. the Irish author of such classics as DIAN DUCHIN REED has been a student THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY, THE of the Dao De Jing and practitioner of IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, and taiji quan for more than three DE PROFUNDIS.

SPRING 2017 | 127 ENDPOINT

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E SHOULD UNDERSTAND WELL that all things are the work of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the W trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four- legged animals, and all the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples. —Black Elk1

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128 | PARABOLA New York Center for Jungian Studies Have Jung ,Will Travel!

17th Annual JUNG IN IRELAND Aging with Panache: Later Life is Now MARCH 31—APRIL 7, 2017 Join us in Galway this Spring and enjoy a unique learning vacation in Ireland. A combination of many workshops to choose from and superb accommodations on Galway Bay insure an experience not to be missed. Our outstanding and distinguished faculty includes Jean Bolen, Erik Goodwyn, Alan Guggenbuhl, Christine Mulvey, Nóirín Ní Riain, and Monika Wikman, among others.

Travel and Study Tour BARCELONA, SPAIN Kabbalah and the Western Mystical Tradition NOVEMBER 5 –12, 2017 Explore some of the great mystical paradigms of the West — from the Kabbalah to Christian and Islamic mysticism — with an outstanding faculty, including Dr. Ann Belford Ulanov and Professor Raymond Scheindlin. Visit splendid museums and experience ﬁrsthand some of Northern Spain’s striking architecture and landscape.

The New York Center for Jungian Studies’ programs are open to the general public and mental health professionals. Each week provides an exceptional opportunity for interested participants from all backgrounds: CE credits avaialable. Accommodations are deluxe and the food is gourmet. Optional outtings to unique sites enhance the experience. For more information or to register nyjungcenter.org • joﬁ[email protected] • 845-256-0191 Subscribe online to the center’s email list — receive timely updates about the faculty, session topics, and more.